Thirty-six
Richard Welk’s words appeared on the screen of
Corin’s computer. WE’RE COMING IN. SARAH TREVOR CALLS THE SHOTS.
PLEASE DON’T, Corin typed in response.
GOT TO. PEOPLE AND EQUIPMENT WENT IN AND ARE
MISSING.
I WARNED YOU WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU INTERFERED.
The screen remained quiet for a moment. SARAH
BELIEVES SHE CAN FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE. SHE CARRIES A BIGGER TORCH THAN
YOU MAY THINK. SEE YOU SOON.
Corin smacked his hand across the keyboard in
frustration. He turned away and paced the control room, glancing from
time to time at the text on the screen.
Evie watched from the shadows across the room. She
slipped onto a stool in front of a darkened console and its monitors. She
had been sleeping fitfully since they had been trapped in the bunker
beneath the hill, frightened for Billy for being gone so much, wondering
if Corin was really able to stop the man that had tried to kill them.
“What’s wrong?” she asked finally. She hadn’t spoke
for most of the day. She thought she deserved to know more of what was
happening.
“Nothing is wrong. I knew it would happen.
I knew I wouldn't be able to stop it. Men will die unnecessarily. We will have to find a means to confront the
adversary sooner than I had anticipated to minimize those deaths. He will have to be defeated
quickly, or he will abandon Silver Ridge and try again elsewhere.”
“If he goes away,” Evie ventured, “then we are safe.”
“If he goes away, he's out of
our reach forever. Your
world is not safe. I’m here only because of the chance intersection
between my adversary’s host and Billy. He must be challenged and defeated
in Silver Ridge.”
“He’s only one man,” Evie said softly so that he
understood it as a question and not a protest.
“I know how farfetched this must sound to you, but he
can cause the breakdown of law and order on a global scale. He can
destroy your world, Evie. He knows how.”
“But why?” She said it calmly, with neither fear nor
complete disbelief. If only she could understand the incredible story he
was telling her. So far, Corin’s adversary had done nothing but burn down
a house.
Corin struggled to contain his impatience. “The
human psyche is tempered by hardship, Evie. War and civil strife destroy
human lives, but some emerge hardened to pain and suffering and are able
to function under the utmost adverse circumstance. They are bereft of
traits valued in a civilized society, a sense of justice, compassion,
feelings of love, tenderness and self-sacrifice. They are men who will
sacrifice everything for their own narrow self-interest. They are highly
valued by some in my society.”
“I really don’t see how men like that could be of
value to anyone,” Evie said with more confidence.
“Where I come from,” Corin said, “humanity invented a
utopia that turned out to be a trap. They use such minds in an attempt to
break free of it.”
Evie just stared at him.
Corin gestured impatiently. “Go ahead and ask your
questions. We might as well get this over with now.”
“A utopia is supposed to be a good place to live,”
she said. “How can it be a trap?”
“A utopia becomes a trap when it reveals itself as
empty of challenge or promise,” Corin said. “Without challenge, curiosity
and enthusiasm are dampened. A perfect, self-contained paradise drains
the human spirit of what it means to be human. If we can’t break free of
our utopia, we’ll eventually fall into a stasis of semi-consciousness, a
stupor of useless awareness, without purpose, without reason for
existence.”
The scenario sounded awful, but Evie took note of an
apparent flaw in his logic. “If that is what your adversary is trying to
escape, why are you trying to stop him?”
Corin eyed the girl in misery. “It’s a difficult
explanation. I’ve been reluctant to attempt it.”
“Tell me so that I can understand and I’ll tell
Billy.”
“A long time ago, from my perspective, the human race
had a war. We thought we had an easy way of waiting out the few centuries
it would take for our machines to repair the environment and restore the
biosphere of the Earth. Our bodies were placed in suspended animation.
Our minds were turned loose fully conscious in a computer, a storage
device for human souls, so to speak. In more technical terms, it is
called a super-conducting quantum mechanical environmental simulator.”
Evie was appalled. “Everybody?”
“Three hundred million of us, the elite of the
society of that time, all we could save. We waited a century for our
machines to repair the damage, and then we tried to get out, to regain
access to our bodies, and to inspect the progress that had been made.
“We couldn’t get out,” Corin said. “We discovered we
had made a terrible error. Subjective time inside the simulator passed
very much faster than physical time outside the machine. We misread our
clock. We thought one hundred years had passed. In fact, perhaps as many
as a thousand centuries may have passed. Or ten thousand, for all we
know.
“We’re still trapped in that machine, Evie. We
haven’t the slightest idea of where we are in time or space.”
Evie was astonished. “Trapped inside a computer?”
“I remember the day I transferred. It was like
waking up inside a magnificent lucid dream. It was, and is, a paradise
beyond imagination.”
“But it’s a trap?” she said.
“So we discovered in time. We’re immortal, Evie. We
can’t die like you can. The simulator won’t allow it. When we discovered
just how dangerous our world had become, we tried harder and harder to get
out. But the machinery used to resuscitate our physical bodies may have
failed. The crypt that contained our bodies may have been destroyed. The
Matrix itself is self-sufficient. For all practical purposes, it is
indestructible.”
Evie was thoroughly confused. “Then how can you be
here?”
Corin shook his head and began walking in circles in
growing frustration. “The Matrix is superconducting. It has no moving
parts. It consumes no energy. I don’t think the engineers that created
it noticed anything unusual about its inhabitants when it was tested. The
test inhabitants noticed nothing unusual.
“It took centuries, but it was discovered that we had
psychic access to what seems to be our past lives. The Matrix seems to allow
us to escape the confines of time and space as we normally perceive it.
Our scientists refer to it as a kind of quantum leakage of consciousness.
It’s like a door opening into other parts of our psyches that span other
probabilities, literally other universes and other worlds.”
“Then you can escape."
Evie said with growing agitation. "So what’s the problem? You make it sound so wonderful and then you keep telling me
how awful it is.”
“There are two answers to that
question. You know the first of them."
Evie thought about it.
"You don't have the right to live Billie's life."
"We can't swamp all of human
history with our narrow perspective without destroying it and replacing it
with unimaginable chaos. The second answer to your question is the
insidious suspicion by a few that this unlimited access we have to
all space and time is merely a fiction, a simulation of the Matrix
responding to the will of the human imagination. After all, that’s what
the Matrix does. It creates the environments we desire without the
slightest effort on our part.”
Evie jumped off the stool. “But that’s not true.
I’m not part of your awful machine. I’m real.”
“My adversary doesn’t think you are. My adversary
thinks that you and your brothers and Silver Ridge and your entire world
is a fantasy created by the Matrix in response to our unconscious
expectations and beliefs.”
“But I’m alive! I truly am!”
Corin chuckled. “I
believe you are, but even if you
were a construct of the Matrix, you’d be conscious and convinced of your
own independent reality. The Matrix has no limitations in that regard.”
Evie’s agitation brought tears to her eyes. “Is that
what I am to you? A product of your own imagination?”
He smiled sadly. “I belong to a faction that is
convinced of your objective reality. But my adversary is convinced that
you are not. That’s how he justifies the destruction he causes. He
thinks that you are a creative aspect of the Matrix, simulations that we
can mold to our need and sacrifice to the Matrix Gateway in our effort to
escape.”
Evie gawked at Corin in horror. “Is that bad?”
“We can’t get out. We have stagnated and grown
weak. Some believe we are too weak to open the Gateway and trigger the
transference to our physical bodies. It is thought that maybe your more
primal psychic energy may succeed where we have failed, regardless of whether you
are simulations or reincarnational selves.”
Evie wet her lips nervously. “Does it work?”
“So far, no, but the stakes are very high. My
adversary and his allies continue to sow the seeds of discord in worlds
they believe to be fantasies. They nourish hatred and lust, the most
powerful of all emotions, and they use the powerful emotions of these
captive souls as a battery ram, so to speak, in an attempt to force the
Matrix Gateway to open.”
“You mean you can steal our souls and take them back
with you to your world?” Evie studied his expressionless face, not
knowing how to react to the nightmarish story, or how much of it to take
seriously. “Whole worlds? Why do you need so many of us?”
“My adversary dares not admit defeat. If he is
wrong, a very special and very terrible fate awaits the Matrix.”
Evie cried out her growing tension. She turned way,
and leaned her forehead against a wall, and beat at it with her fists.
She closed her eyes and tried not to think of Corin’s hellish story.
But it kept churning around inside her mind. “Do
they let us come back to our own worlds when they’re done with us?”
“You are destroyed in the process,” Corin said
softly.
Evie turned back to him on the verge of a panic.
“The Matrix Gateway stores the pattern of a human
psyche in a special buffer to be transferred to its body,” Corin said.
“The buffer can only harbor a human mind for a short period of time.
Within seconds, it causes severe sensory deprivation. Powerful emotions,
almost always fearful and claustrophobic, negative emotions, tend to be
reflected back upon themselves. Feedback causes intense hallucinations.
These hallucinatory experiences are invariably so traumatic as to cause
madness and severe deformation of the psyche."
Evie was too afraid to ask what happened to such
people. She was both afraid to ask, and she sensed Corin was going to
tell her something she did not want to hear.
“The psychic damage cannot be repaired within the
Matrix, so the Matrix stores the injured personality at an isolated
electronic address for future therapeutic intervention. By now, there
must be many thousands of these distorted psyches tucked away in their
private hells, still conscious, hallucinating, suffering their last
moments of horror to only God knows to what degree. We thought we had
created heaven, Evie. We were wrong, but we did manage to create hell.”
Evie whispered the accusation. “They condemn
innocent people to hell.”
Corin shook his head slightly. “If these
personalities are only simulations of the Matrix, they have no enduring
existence. They come and go as needed. I and others who share my beliefs
feel that this is not the case.”
“But they have to be evil men to take such an awful
risk!” Evie cried out.
“You need to understand the extent of their
desperation. There are millions of us. We have increasingly languished
in our paradise. We don’t die. We have an eidetic memory, never
forgetting a moment of our endless lives. Eventually, we begin to fall
into a kind of fugue, a dreamlike state that would be peaceful if we were
not haunted by the greatest of our fears, and memory of some of the
genuine evils we have committed. This nightmare, Evie, intensifies as we
lose control of it.
“In the end, we will suffer the depths of a living
hell that will dwarf the fate of those trapped in the buffers. We will
suffer for as long as the Matrix exists, and if the Matrix is adrift in
space as some believe it must be by now, then our hell may last for
uncountable eons.”
“But isn’t there somebody who can help you, somebody
outside the Matrix?”
Corin had pondered that question himself for
centuries. He laughed at the unutterable irony of their plight. “Evie,
if you are real, then we do have access to physical reality, and we have
apparent access to human cultures that exist in our future as well as our
past. We have already contacted many of these cultures. If these civilizations are real, and not illusions
generated by the Matrix, then we have untold numbers of the descendents of
the human species helping to search for the Matrix. If they find it, they
will destroy it and end our suffering.”
Evie waited for him to finish, frightened of the
strange intensity of his laughter. “Evie, I told you. The Matrix itself
is very small.”
“Then it’s lost?” Evie said.
“Even the continents drift over the millennia. We
could be buried a hundred miles beneath the crust of the earth. The
Matrix may have been located on the surface of the Moon for safe-keeping, some
other world, or in solar orbit. The location of the Matrix was never to
be disclosed to anyone for security reasons. We don’t even know what it
looks like.”
Evie’s thoughts were in a turmoil. She thought she
understood most of it. It all narrowed down to one all-important
question. “How can we stop him?”
“You can stop him by believing that he can be
stopped.”
That made no sense. Evie was frightened, but she
held her tears back. “Can’t we just shoot him?”
Corin laughed again. Gently. “You can only kill the
body he uses. He would simply find another.”
“Then how?”
“The only way to stop him is to challenge him to a
duel of resolve. You must undermine his confidence in his belief that he
can dominate and control you. He believes himself to be an expert in the
power of negative emotion, anger and fear. He is a terrorist. Refuse him
that power.”
Evie was appalled. “But he blew up Billy’s mansion!
He tried to kill us!”
Corin was still smiling tolerantly. “In this world,
yes, but our world works by willpower. Think of it as a waking dream.
How do you open a door in a dream if you believe that you cannot? In a
dream, belief and willpower is everything. Physical power is an
illusion.”
“But we don’t live in your world!”
“The adversary thinks that you do.”
Evie thought it out. “Then everything would just be
an illusion.”
“Consciousness and the structure of consciousness is
no illusion, not our suffering nor our joy.”
She sighed heavily.
“It’s not relevant which world we live in, Evie. You
must defeat the adversary by the rules he abides by. His rules state that
physical force is an illusion.”
“But Noah and Ella May are dead,” she reminded him.
“I died, too, along time ago. So did the adversary.
Many times. There’s more to life and death than you perceive, more to
your world than you can imagine.”
She stared at him in confusion.
“Our lives are built upon the choices we make
regardless of what world we live in. When you face the adversary, he will
undermine all of your beliefs in yourself. He will then incite a wanton
rage and he will pit that rage against the walls of our prison. You must
give him the power to do this to you. Refuse it, and he is helpless.
Helpless, he is defeated, and defeated, his own personal hell begins, one that
I have never believed he could avoid.”
Evie finally gave up. She shook her head. “I can’t
do this any more.”
Corin went to her finally. It was the thing that he
wanted to avoid, but he could not deny himself without denying Evie.
He embraced her, and she held tight to him and wept.
“What you believe about yourself is important, Evie.
Beliefs allow us to live our lives with only partial understanding of what
life is all about. Only people can do that. My little machines can’t
make do with half a computer program, but you make do with far less and
even manage to create whole new realities in the process. Your mind
just fills in your ignorance with most likely scenarios, or what you
believe them to be. You once believed gods threw lightning bolts.
The belief served its purpose until you discovered electricity.”
Evie relaxed a little.
“In the end, belief creates our sense of self, and my
people use the term resolve to denote the strength of that belief. In the
end, all conflicts are conflicts of belief, whether you are within a
physical system, or outside of it. The only way the adversary can harm
you is to undermine your confidence in your ability to be yourself. The
only way you can be of use to him is to be tricked into feeling hatred for
your failings and the failings of others. Then he can steer your soul and
pit your power against an unyielding lock.”
Evie turned away in numbed confusion. “I’m tired and
I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
She walked from the room leaving Corin suspended in
the midst of the horror he had brought so vividly alive in his quest for
even a glimmer of Evie’s understanding. If only he, too, could turn way
and blot it all out from his mind.
It was a luxury beyond his capabilities. He turned
back to his monitors in the endless battle to hold the most terrible of
possible worlds at bay.
