Raine VS The End of the World (16 page)

A parlay with ancient Atlanteans ended rather inconclusively, with a message simply advising, “Forget Atlantis. You don’t want to know.”

Taking Nikola Tesla under her wing and helping to fund and develop his revolutionary inventions worked masterfully, but because his technological breakthroughs eliminated all competition in the energy sector, the global elite united against them. Although Lily prevailed and had a good chance of accomplishing the mission, the resulting bloodbath took a toll on her mental health, leading to the couple’s untimely resignation, and a romantic life in exile.

Saving Lily’s parents had been accomplished, but supposedly that timeline didn’t end with the people of Earth faring any better.

And then there was the
Jerusalem Un-Incident.
A memory best not revisited at the moment.

Rutger dimmed the lights. Lily sat in thoughtful silence and kept the lone candle company until it melted into a puddle of wax.

“Thank you once again, future me,” she said, and stood up. “May you find peace in your final moments.”

Lily ritualistically ventured out of her chair and towards the Remediator Room. Against the back wall stood the empty pods. They were home to her helpers, and for a few mostly joyous years, she was not alone.

A photograph on the corkboard showed the Sky Admiral – no, the
Belladonna’s
Captain – surrounded by three girls who resembled her in every way. Lily had her arms around them; they were smiling. The future of planet Earth was theirs to save, to shape, to awaken. In other photographs were Gerrit and Raine, also smiling. Both so spirited, so determined to make a difference.

“Are they doing well?” Lily asked.

“Perfectly healthy and on schedule,” Rutger replied.

Lily took one last sip of her hot (now cold) chocolate, left the chamber, and called up the Dream Recorder. She reclined into her seat and put on a shining crown. Familiar waves of discomfort arose as the device pried into her head, reading the fluctuations of her brain wavelengths. This data fed back as stimuli, inducing a state of subconscious lethargy. The pain was a necessary and not completely unwelcome reminder of her mortality, but this inner work was important. She flipped down its opaque visor.

“Access previous. Playback now,” Lily read to the monitor. She felt her temples relax and her worldly body sink into the chair. Within seconds she had lost all sensation, her brain completely arrested into an REM sleep state.

As in many of her dreams, the Captain was an ordinary teenager in the early twenty-first century, a state of mind likely molded by films of that era. This time she was sneaking into a large building, some sort of convention center. Despite the heat, people crowded every gate, doorway and window. Armed guards patrolled in calculated circles. Lily slipped past a distracted sentry and found a way around the delivery dock, up five flights of stairs, and across an empty hallway into a labyrinth blanketed in vines. Endless breeds of impossible flowers lined the floor.

The place smelled of life, and Lily got rather drunk on it. She tiptoed her way between the overgrown flowers, and the walls seemed to grow ever higher with each step, until the glass ceiling disappeared into a single speck of light.

Her happiness turned suddenly to horror as the air grew thinner, and the labyrinth fell into darkness. The maze faded into a lifeless hall, and Lily collapsed in fear. She was helped to her feet by eyeless ciphers. Their wide mouths housed the gentlest expressions.

“Are you all right, Lily?” one asked.

“I’m fine. Thank you so much.”

She was unnervingly grateful. As the beings walked away Lily caught herself proceeding dumbly through the architecture of the office hallway, passing androids armed with files and cups of coffee and cell phones, making every visible turn to get to the glowing Exit sign, and eventually noticing the office had turned into a middle school.

Time slowed almost to a stop as tween kids ran through the halls, laughing gaily. They burst through large double doors, became engulfed in blinding light. She tried to follow them, but an odd feeling stopped her at an intersection. To her side, three other kids stood arm in arm, staring at her. She couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls or if they meant to harm or help her, but their menacing glares were terrifying. Observing her dream self’s state of mind, Lily noticed the effects of blind fear mingled with confusion, as she ran back down the other way, up two flights of stairs and into an empty classroom. The specters had followed, and hovered right at the door when she slammed it. One of them slipped through and loomed over the girl.

“Get away! Leave me!” Lily screamed at the shadowy figure.

“You are nothing,” the figure responded. “You have failed.”

“Shut up!” bellowed the girl, pushing the teacher’s desk up against the doorway.

“Do you want to know the truth, Lily?”

“What is the truth?”

“Your mother is trapped in a bag,” the figure said.

At a complete loss for words, Lily observed her dream-self back away from the desk. She picked up a chair with sudden strength and hurled it through the nearest window.

“You’re lying,” she said to the spirit, although deep down she knew that it must be true.

“See for yourself,” was its last reply before falling to the floor in a black puddle.

Lily grabbed the vacuum cleaner standing in the corner and took hold of its power cord. She placed the teacher’s desk up to the window and wedged the vacuum against it, creating an anchor for her makeshift rope. After calculating the distance, Lily wrapped the end of the cord around her fist and executed a running jump out the window. She fell outwards, swung back hard at the building, and directed her momentum towards a window on the lower storey. She kicked out at full force, smashing it into pieces.

Dropping the cord, Lily rolled out of the crash, and into a running start. She made for a doorway, but there was none. The school became her weapons factory in Jakarta; it made sense that the tragedy would be on her mind. Lorelei recently wiped this place off the face of the Earth. Tens of thousands of the faceless beings stopped their work, gaping at her with an almost reverent glow.

“Where’s my mother?” yelled Lily.

The workers made a path through the factory with their bodies. An avenue to the left of this chamber ended in an ornate door, and in between it and her current position, a security office peeked out of the corridor. Within, a group of four men sat at a table, playing poker. Somehow she knew instinctively that the man with his back to her was her father. She nervously tiptoed past the threshold, but he turned to catch her eye. In this dream, she barely remembered his face, which was wrong. Dead wrong. In reality, there was no way she could forget her one and only papa. Nor would she have any reason to distrust him.

“Daddy,” she began, to no response.

She felt a palpable sense of fear. The girl bravely raised her voice.

“Is it true?”

“You must discover that on your own,” he replied.

Lily gulped, and then pushed open the door running.

Now she was in the Palace of Versailles, her sneakers squeaking on the polished floor as she passed a live concerto and leapt over a couple making out in a chaise.

In the center of the room, with its endlessly high ceiling and humongous windows, dwelt a perfect half-sphere of a pit, leading far underground. She dashed down the torch-lit spiral stairs; to her great horror, some fifty feet below, in the midst of an incantation circle, sat a burlap sack, moving slowly but quietly in the faint candlelight.

Lily’s stomach sank, but she conquered her fears. She walked up slowly to the bag, and with nervous hands undid the combination lock (2212) and pulled the top open. Her mother emerged from the canvas malnourished and weak, but still strikingly beautiful. They embraced.

“Mom!”

“I’m so glad you came, honey,” her mother cried. “But you shouldn’t be here.”

Lily heard the click of a revolver. She turned around bravely.

A faceless being greeted her. Man or woman, it was difficult to tell. Its only clear feature was its gaping mouth.

And it had a revolver pointed straight at her.

“Remove her, and this world reverts to chaos.” Its voice was a babbling chorus of every accent she had ever heard in her life.

“That can’t be!” stomped Lily. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Oh, but that’s the way it is. It’s the way it’s always been. It’s a deal we made, and we all agreed on it. One person would suffer, and the rest of us would live in peace. You’re just unfortunate enough to be her daughter. Put her back in the bag or suffer the consequences.”

“And what are the consequences?”

The faceless one pressed the gun against Lily’s forehead.

Elizabeth screamed and pulled Lily away. It shot her in the shoulder; she crumpled to the floor. Lily rushed to her, lip quivering. She spun around to face the faceless being.

“If you’re going to do it, then do it.”

It chuckled.

“Do you know why you can face death so naïvely? It’s because this is a dream, and your existence here means nothing. You tell yourself, Lily, you’re different, you’re special, and you know something everyone else doesn’t. I say that’s bullshit. There’s nothing in the heart of the darkest man that you don’t have in your own heart. You think you can change the world? You can’t change anything without realizing that.”

“I love my mother.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I won’t let her die in this bag. If that means you shooting me in the head, so be it.”

The creature scowled, and then curled its dry lips upwards. It was a smile Lily recognized as her own.

“Goodbye.”

As the bullet rushed through her head, Lily felt her brain splitting in two in extreme slow motion, her mind forever at peace. For just a split-second, the synapses connecting the two sides of her dream-brain divorced, causing her to experience a singular, eternal instant of liberation.

She was on the verge of understanding the futility of worry, the inevitability of individual death, that endless essence of her spiritual being. Lillian was a step away from becoming one with the universe. But the screaming voice kept drawing her back to the dream. She looked down and saw that her mother was now cradling her body, sobbing over her blood-soaked child.

Dad took the bad person and started beating him, or her, up. Other men joined in shortly, allowing Carl to run down the stairs and untie Elizabeth. They looked worriedly at Lily. Mom was trying to say something to her, but she couldn’t hear the words. Everything blurred as her consciousness faded. Just before succumbing to death, Lily awoke.

The Captain took a deep breath, her back drenched in sweat. The circlet was removed. Powering off the Dream Recorder, Lily took a sip of the new cup of cocoa Rutger had prepared, switched the lights on, vacuum-showered, changed clothes, and headed into the greenhouse for some fresh air.

After donning her gardening apron and gloves, Lily watered and tended the food forest that was the key to sustained life in space. It kept her oxygen cycling, cleaned her water reserves, and provided her with all manner of nutritional sustenance. Rutger had been doing a stand-up job in her absence. Fresh-and saltwater fish were healthy. New corn and tomato crops grew particularly well. Light and mulch levels were quickly adjusted. Computerized readouts by each one let her know how they were faring, and what types of care each needed. Tending these living things calmed her, gave her a nurturing feeling.

She then ascended the staircase to the observatory. A front-row seat to the wonders of the universe was the best remedy against the claustrophobia and cabin fever that defined her psyche. There were still a few hours to go until the
Phoenix
was prepped.

Here Lily was about to retire for the evening, and the sun was setting in Naples,
down on Earth, that big blueberry of a planet that took up the expanse of her viewing window and colored her office in its patterns. Its current forms of life would last so short a time, a fleeting cornerstone of civilization.

What did the dream mean? Jung would have had a field day with it.

In all the time I’ve been busy, I’ve neglected my inner work. My waking mind is rebelling. Like that of an insane person, it just won’t stop chattering, filled with the doubts and worries of countless lifetimes. I must give myself a moment to observe objectively, to diagnose the problem.

No state of being is permanent. Not a single atom in this universe can stay in a state of equilibrium for even a trillionth of a second. A candle’s flame appears to be static, but in actuality arises only to fade away. These sensations, too, must pass. It is best to remain a mere observer and let the negativity run its course.

March tenth, two thousand, two hundred and twelve; the date she had written in permanent marker on the glass kept reminding her. The day of the solar flare, the day everyone on Earth was going to die. It was an event over two decades in the future, but it would be coming all too soon.

X. The Mana Tree

“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on Earth
plants something in his soul.” – Thomas Merton

Raine and Gerrit emerged from the untouched bunker. The sea creatures slithered across the shore and back into dark waters as the virtual noontime sun far above pierced the cold void.

“I’d hate to be cleaning up this mess,” Raine observed, as both Chance and the penguin, who had become fast friends, skipped away merrily towards a collapsed sushi delivery truck and went to town on its messy remains. “I don’t suppose there’s an escalator nearby.”

“There’s always a way out. In the meantime, let’s party up.”

Gerrit navigated Raine through her menu screens and had her approve him as a party member. Now his Health and Mana bars were visible, and matching indicators floated over their heads. This made it easier to locate one’s ally in the midst of crowded battles, Gerrit insisted.

“Since there’s no teleporting in this area, we oughta check the pier,” he reasoned, guiding Raine over a dangerous pile of splintered wood.

They walked in silence towards a small wharf. As they approached, a simple rowboat spawned, barely rocking in the still waters. Gerrit guided Raine onto the thing, and tried to impress her by whipping out a compass plug-in on his watch. Taking up oar, the boy rowed into the abyss as Chance napped in between them, the feline’s furry coat now taking on the shimmering quality of a soft lantern.

The two humans made pleasant conversation for as long as they could.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Raine acquiesced at last.

“We crossed over to a Peace zone two minutes ago. There should be a respawn point and a teleport pad just south of here. Keep a look out.”

Raine squinted into the distance. Something was flickering. She brought it to Gerrit’s attention.

“Good eye. That’s gotta be the stairwell torch. I bet you we’re somewhere under Ramzaa by now.”

“It’s cold,” she said.

“When we get out of here, remind me to show you how to bypass the Network kernels and modify your nerve settings.”

“Say what now?”

“You can make the cold seem less cold. Change how your body reacts. My friend Yossa, for example. He’s a Homo-Pachyderm. Part man, part elephant, but he’s modded his personal gravity to have less of an effect. He can hop clear across fields.”

“Nifty. That sounds like quite a trip.”

I’ve never heard her slang before,
Gerrit thought.
Is it some sort of regional dialect?

“I do odd jobs for him, and he keeps me patched with the latest hacks and plug-ins. Heck, I’m actually more powerful than most
Templars. We’ll spar sometimes, for Gold. I hold myself back so they have no idea how great of a fighter I am, but the truth is, I can view the
Verse
’s code and predict their moves. Sometimes I can slow certain attacks down, too, just by a few milliseconds. The trick is to use those techniques only when absolutely necessary.”

“So, you’re tricking the system. You’re a cheater!”

Gerrit bit his tongue. No one had ever outright called him a cheater.

“Well, I heard that if you look at the programming,
Endless Metaverse
was meant to be anything that anyone wants to make of it. As long as you aren’t stealing, or harming anyone, there’s no rules, no limits. That’s probably how it was supposed to be played. Sure, currently there’s a centralized society and cities and governments and war and whatnot, but at least people choose their own roles.”

“People can do that in real life, too. Kinda.”

“Real life? You mean the world outside?”

Raine nodded.

“By the gods!” The sudden revelation that Raine had memories outside of the game hit Gerrit like a ton of bricks. He wondered if the girl shared similar insights to his dream-visions. “Did you come from real life? What am I saying, if you’re here, then you… you must have.”

“I came from Chicago, in nineteen ninety-two.”

“DO YOU REMEMBER IT?”

“Uh… yeah?”

“What’s it like out there?!”

“What do you mean? It’s… okay, I guess.”

“Is that what the world is called? Nineteen ninety-two?”

Raine cringed.
Just like the others. He doesn’t know anything.

“No, no, no, ninety-two’s the year. The world isn’t… it’s not like the world here. It’s a large sphere with six billion people on it.”

“A sphere? So there’s no edge to it?” Gerrit frowned. “And six billion, that’s way too many. That number can’t be right. Unless there are even more servers than the code suggests…”

“You’d better believe it.” It was beyond bizarre that she had to explain this to someone she was actually having a conversation with. “We live on a planet called Earth.”

“Earth,” Gerrit repeated softly. “What does it look like?”

“It doesn’t look like just one place,” Raine began. “It depends on where you live. There’s cities, mountains, deserts, forests, jungles, islands…”

“Were you a part of a mutual adoptive family, or a guild?”

“Huh? I guess you could say I kind of have a family. I live with my new foster Mom in a condo…”

“A what?”

“How do I explain… it’s like a house, but smaller, and they usually have many condos in one building, you know? She’s rarely home, so I spend a lot of time in the city. I go to the arcades, play videogames. Sometimes hang out in the park. They’re nothing like the parks here. Only homeless people live there. I remember this nice secluded spot by the old slide. I’d sit and read library books about space travel and far-off worlds. I don’t suppose you know what a library is?”

Gerrit shook his head.

“Well, it’s this place with all these books. Just piles of them. Only… you’ve never read a book, have you?”

He held his gaze low.

No freakin’ way.
Raine was at a loss. Not only had she failed at getting through to him, bringing back memories of the place she at least half-understood made her a little homesick.

Ugh. When did that happen? I thought I liked – even preferred – it here. But Gerrit’s completely forgotten the outside world. Is that going to happen to me, too?

Truth be told, it did feel like her memories of home were in danger of slipping away. Even thinking back to the day she entered the
Metaverse
, specifics eluded the girl.
I can’t even remember what I ate for breakfast.
She made a mental note to write everything down as soon as she could, and to continue to recall her past, painful as it was, lest she lose her sense of self.

Even with Raine’s overactive imagination, it was impossible for her to see how this world could have resulted from the one she grew up in. They were two completely different realities.

Gerrit sensed that he was losing her again.

“Did you like it there? In… Earth?”

“Hmm? Oh, I guess it’s okay. A busy sort of place. Kinda predictable, but also violent. And crazy. But… at the same time, I feel like things didn’t have to be that way. Like, people just tried too hard, at everything. Somewhere down the line we started caring about unimportant stuff. Saying it now, I don’t know if that sounds nutso, but truth is it’s not like here at all. Here it’s just a hundred percent ridiculous. But not necessarily in a bad way.”

Gerrit sulked. He had never thought that the outside world could be more boring than the one he was currently living in.

“It sounds like you keep your memories, though,” he ventured. “Up there.”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Raine reassured him. “Although, a lot of people do lose their memories when they get older. Not everyone. My friend Jordan’s gramps was in World War Two. He’s ninety-three years old and still going strong. He hasn’t forgotten everything, not yet.”

Raine noticed that this seemed to blow Gerrit’s mind.

Probably not all those memories are good, though. Maybe some are better best forgotten.
Raine looked down at the fading ripples as she carefully braided the ends of her long hair, just like Jane, one of her past foster mothers taught her to. She was one of the nice ones, but her creepy husband, on the other hand… he was the reason she left.

“It’s funny. I spent a lot of time running away from everything and everyone in my world… now I’m wondering if I’ll be stuck here forever.”

“Maybe you chose to come down here,” Gerrit posited.

“What? Why would I do that?”

“It’s one of the theories we have. Maybe you got bored with that place and wanted something more exciting. Maybe you decided that there weren’t enough choices in real life.”

“But wouldn’t I have remembered making that decision?”

“Not if they messed with your memories.”

“Why in the world would they do that?”

He swallowed, unsure how to answer.

“Gerrit, tell me.”

“I don’t know,” he replied, clearly more than a little stunned. “You’re the exception to the rule. No one else I’ve met has any memories from the other side whatsoever. Some even say there is no other side, and we’re just… trapped here, somehow. But I don’t believe that. It’s possible that the Developers are protecting us from dangers in that world, or that they just don’t want us to leave because we’ll see there’s so much more out there.”

He almost expected her to scoff like most people he told his theories to, but Raine actually considered these suppositions. Neither one sounded implausible.

“I do kind of remember something in between this world and the one I came from,” said Raine. “I can’t recall it too well. It was a real eyesore, a white expanse of nothingness.”

“Probably one of the hubs. A waiting area of sorts. We’re sent there sometimes when they change something big.”

As he said this, they arrived within wading distance of the torch-lit island and descended into the chilly water. Upon seeing Gerrit splash into the darkened sea, Chance jumped atop Raine’s head and brightened his coat to guide the way.

Chance’s light activated long-dormant crystals set into the shore. The trio looked up in awe. Before them stood a great tree many hundreds of feet tall, long fallen into ruin. Its decayed limbs loomed high and wide over them, but cast not a single shadow in the faint light.

“It’s so sad, and yet so beautiful,” Raine noted wistfully.

“Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the legendary Mana Tree,” Gerrit chimed in, taking his helmet off as a sign of respect. “Or what’s left of it, at least.”

Having placed her hand up against the trunk, Raine turned towards her companion.

“What happened to it?”

“I’m guessing it was buried under here, like the rest of the older version of the
Metaverse.
”

“This tree was once something special.” Raine searched the ground. “Wasn’t it?”

“So they say,” said Gerrit. “It once kept nature in balance, whatever that means. It’s heartbreaking to see it like this. What are you--”

“Aha!” Raine cried aloud, holding a plum-sized, teardrop-shaped object in her hand. Chance walked across her shoulders to her arm and sniffed it.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Only one way to find out,” Raine announced. She tapped it lightly against her wristwatch as she’d seen other players do, prompting a window displaying an item description.

Seed of Mana Tree

Will grow anywhere with adequate water and sunlight. Resistant to drought and magicks. May bring the world back into equilibrium. Plant carefully, and do not plan for any structures within a two hundred meter radius.

“Very educational,” Gerrit conceded with a whisper. “But we probably ought to split before the Temps catch our scent.”

He pointed in the direction they’d come from. In the far distance, Templars carrying lanterns glided over the still waters, patrolling the area. And one was heading their way.

Chance dimmed his coat. Gerrit turned the rowboat and its oars into a miniature with a series of taps on its menu buttons. He stuck it in his belt pack, hiding the evidence. Using a Hover spell to mask their tracks, the trio hopped across the sandbars and booked it quietly to the other end of the island, where the water glimmered in reflected neon.

Above this beach were the Northern Lights, or so Raine thought, until a closer look showed her that it was a very tangible stairwell with an ever-changing array of beautiful hues glowing from its steps. It wound up and around itself constantly in an uneven fashion, never making a true spiral as it organically carved its way to the surface like Jack’s gigantic beanstalk. The odd pixels trickled down again, only this time they were white, and reflected the glorious lights off the staircase, creating a million dazzling, lustrous patterns.

“This is incredible!” Raine exclaimed as she followed Gerrit up the first flight.

“Ugh. The Five Thousand Steps,” he griped. “Here I thought there would be a teleport pad or something. And what’s up with all these data storms lately? Do you know anything about them, Raine?”