Now or Later
It is such a strange thing to live, to feel that insatiable desire to experience. And all the while, to be told of your own self-importance, your ultimate place in a grand universe, yourself even grander. To hunger for the torrent of experiences.
1
A thousand colors pollute the horizon, jaggedly blazing off of every square inch of surface. Neon pinks collide with deep reds and electric blues, and through the haze of a misty fog the terrible cacophony of lights burst into every seam and corner. “Julia, you’re looking sad today, did you know that 5mg of fluvoxamine a day can improve your mood by up 36.8% guaranteed?!?” Head downcast, the woman’s pace only continues on mechanically. With chestnut brown hair and deep brown eyes reflecting the horrendous noise of the omnipresent lights, Julia filters out and notes the incessant cries for attention. “You are 99% more likely to be accomplished and satisfied with your life if you own Amur fashion products! Make him want you! You have gained weight Julia, lack of sleep and increased stress levels lead to a lack of metabolic production, take Estrin-D to burn that fat off! And take Luna for a great night’s sleep, you look like you need it, your sleep number is down 23.2% since September 20th!” Her jacket ripples in the wind, an antiquated item, the deep red velvet fighting to tone down the gaudy neon shooting in every direction. With the texture and appearance of a rose, it softly wraps around her waist and meets her faded black pants, stained with countless meals and weathered by years of use. She brushes her hair out of her eye, a seemingly innocuous motion; but anything but.
2
He sees her lift her hand and brush the hair behind her ear, he sees behind the indifferent mask, a woman from before the new religion pervaded every mind and obsessed every single person. But what did he know, his face chiseled from the constant erosion of acid rain, his skin burned from a gang of teenage malcontents. Barely living here, scouring for LSD, heroin, and any hallucinogen he could touch, he was nothing more than a rambling fool, an anachronism in the dark. But he knew, that despite the trajectory of the world, once what was lost could be found.
3
A beam of light cuts down the street, and a curved car, with four white-chrome bubbles evenly spaced, gently moves through the lights. Ignorant of his surroundings, suffering from the cruel withdrawal of his only escape, the lost man steps into the light. Gently zooming, the car crushes the man, annihilating his life. “Fuck. Motherfucking parasites can’t stay off the streets. How many fucking times do I have to deal with these fucking shits! For Fuck’s sake I might as well be in True Reality.” He wore black satin, lined with lines as dark as night, his suit melted into his skin. The white pure interior of his car was filled with soft running lights, with every surface smooth, graceful, and sleek. “Oh baby you’re hot when you’re angry,” draped over his shoulder, the woman wore a white and black dress, of which no modesty could be spared. Her breasts pushed out the middle of her dress, thin lines attached to her skin and essentially only covering her nipples.
She stopped. For a second she stopped everything. The man on the platform below her was just ripped apart by a sports car, gracefully wrecking its way across the streets. “Ouch. Invest in Amway life insurance, and leave something behind for someone else.”
The voices never stopped, not as long as you lived.
4
All of humanity’s id, lied bare and naked. Thrust into the forefront of all existence, the narrowest and darkest corners of the human mind pervaded every single experience. Deep inside the recesses of the mind what once lied dormant and forgotten, now dominated every thought. Oh the id, the id!!! Lust, anger, fear, pleasure, sensory pleasure. Nothing more, all life cast into an iron cage, freed to do whatever it pleases with no limit. And in all its freedom, the mind could only choose slavery to the addiction of only the basest of desires.
“We’re making the world, by making yours! Every person is their own world and with CoreTech we’ve made that truly possible in the most complete sense. With the CoreTech x80 implant every single part of you will be known, and everything you could ever want will be specifically engineered for you. Never before has all humanity been so special. Before only the rich and powerful could live like gods, separate and above the rest of us. Using their wealth and resources to craft worlds we could only dream of. Never before has humanity all had access to infinite euphoria. The euphoria of not only every sensory pleasure imaginable, but every possible world. Now everyone is a god. Be a god today. Live in True Reality, the only real Reality.”
5
Steven brushed aside his long black hair, filled with grease and the stench of fried artery clogging food. His face glowed a greenish yellow, his body trapped in a concrete cube filled with nothing more than fluorescent lights and a ripped carbon fiber filled sleeping bag. It had been 6 hours. 6 FUCKING hours since he had been inside True Reality. The bones on his fingers extended outward as he rapidly and disharmoniously tapped his fingers on his knees. His head vibrated: “NA-192828839 you have an incoming call from Sena Inc. you will be charged $67.98 for this call. Thank you.”
“This is an automated message. NA-192828839, port 35A at Sena Street and AT&T boulevard requires specific human monitored cleanup. Arrive by 23:55:55”
Sena Inc was a subsidiary holding of CoreTech. CoreTech quite essentially owned everyone and everything, due to its monopolization of the implant market and subsequently the VR market. Every single person ever born had a CoreTech X80 implant in their heads. Even the CEO of CoreTech had one, though some speculated he had a special, unique and non-traceable version. Such speculation was irrelevant, as was most anything outside of the CoreTech simulation. Of course the X80 implant had been optional originally; but extraordinarily sought after. After all, who didn’t want the ability to calculate 1828282*282882, any fathomable mathematical problem, any logical puzzle, any problem, who didn’t want to have all known knowledge interfaced and accessible from their very own mind? Any engineering problem, any conceivable problem could be solved with the X80 and it’s seamless mind/computer interface. Dr. Von Marion, the genius behind the X80s architecture, excelled in pioneering the field of neuro-computational science, effectively cracking the human mind and generating commensurate and even more powerful computational machines than any biological mind. Not only was the X80 incredible in this regard, but also in its coveted and even more precious ability to allow one’s mind access to the CoreTech True Reality. (yes CoreTech had the arrogance to proclaim their world as more real than reality). True Reality; with the replacement of one word, CoreTech vanquished the oxymoron ‘Virtual Reality.’ Every desire, every sensation, every thought ever conceived anywhere, in any mind found its way into True Reality. The mayhem and chaos of existence, of sentience in any form, of low entropic beings, all found its way into True Reality. The X80 was the master of the mind, with its circuits implanting themselves in every single neuron, with the ability to trigger any and every sensation, any emotion, any feeling, any possible permutation of active neurons, and thus, infinity. The X80 could through its own design trigger any amount of any neurotransmitter, to achieve any design. Truly transcending all reality, True Reality is every possibility.
6
Steve lifted the corner of his sleeping bag off the floor, using his other hand to pull out a shedding and torn black thread jacket. His occupation with Sena Inc was tantamount to indentured servitude, or more accurately willful slavery. Squirming his way into his jacket, Steve made for the door, exiting his box into a hall even more yellow and dim than his sleeping space. Turning to the right and walking speedily with his head downcast, the pale man threw his left shoulder forward as he moved, his right arm moving in a 110 degree arc while his left arm sat mostly limp at his side. He passed another man, lying on the floor with emptied chargers (Chargers were intense electrical ‘shots’ that illegally stimulated the mind via tricking the X80 into stimulating an extreme and dangerous release of pleasurable neurotransmitters). He passed another pair of people, two woman sensuously licking each other, or rather one woman licking a mostly unconscious one. He didn’t even notice. He kept storming down the dingy hall, until finally reaching an exit. Pulling the handle furiously, he exited the hall and entered a .25 by .25 m cylinder and ascended 600 feet in a matter of seconds. Now pushing the door open and racing down the street, Steve stopped at the sky track. Every five minutes a pair of boxes would whoosh by, stopping for 15 seconds. The time: 23:35:46. His head pounded with a migraine, as his fingers continued to rapidly tap on his knee. He summoned the X80 (the X80 was as much a part of the brain as any part of the cerebrum, and though it operated and could affect any unconscious thoughts, the user felt as if it was fully a part of their conscious mind). He quickly performed the time calculations for his journey. He would make it to port 35A at Sena Street and AT&T boulevard at 23:50:19. Excellent more than 5 minutes to spare. The sky car arrived as exactly expected, and its doors creaked open. Though the car itself was grimy and unclean, it wasn’t littered with the typical vandalism one would expect in a seedy world; there was no purpose for such trivial activities in a world with True Reality.
7
Lights. Glowing, omnipresent lights filled Steve’s vision as he exited the sky car. A light mist and fog pervaded the scene. Stepping onto the platform, Steve arrived at 23:50:19 and noted that no voices filled his head. A courtesy of Sena Inc no doubt, to temporarily silence the incessant stream of ‘life advice’. Looking down below, Steve saw the body. A mess, a man strewn across the concrete in a puddle of his own blood. His acid burned face and torn skin, his hip bone extruding from his side. Steve knew why he was here, and why this wasn’t simply a job for sanitation bots. The X80. Everyone had one. Even this neglected vagabond of a soul had one. And CoreTech would never take any chances with the X80. They always needed confirmation that they were disposed of without being stolen or without being tampered with. He pulled a thin tube off his belt, walked up to the dead man, and stabbed him in the head. Extracting the X80 was a matter of simply digging the X80 out of the brain, and verifying it had indeed wiped itself. Yes, the X80 was programmed (unless for unknown reasons) to erase all its data and destroy its processor. And CoreTech still wanted personnel to verify this was the case, even though it was programmatically infallible.
8
It was burning. Everything was burning. Her head throbbed. All the lights, normally a minor nuisance, burned into her eyes. Every word spoken by her ‘life advisor’ penetrated her head, every whoosh of a passing sky car, every clink from a scattering animal, every single sensory input bore into her. It was rebirth, it was regermination, it was burning, insatiable, pain wrenching and pleasurable all at once. In that moment, her very essence wasn’t merely her; she could see herself and it wasn’t her. That man, whose life had been ripped from him with all the importance of a mere gnat, lied below her platform. In that grotesquely insignificant death, on that grotesquely banal evening, humanity was found in inhumanity. The burning sensation continued, as the words began to melt into a senseless stream of absolutely incoherent rambling. A misty rain gathered on her red jacket, forming tiny clear beads on the rosy threads.
9
Her first memories were of a barnhouse, standing eight meters tall and covered in weathered red paint, spots of rusted orange streaking down its side, chipped wood crossing the doors to its entrance. The sunrises were always beautiful, covering the entire green meadow with orange and gold rays. Cats ran back and forth across the dirt, darting in between chickens and alpha roosters. Her mother always came out of their two story, white wooden house, as the first rays of dawn shot across those fields. Standing there with a bucket of grain in her hands, Julia sprinted out of the house to scare the feeding chickens. “Julia! Stop messing with those poor birds and get back here!” She would eventually return, giddy and giggling, full of youth and vigor. Her father would always sit her in his lap, beside the fireplace and read her tales and stories of amazing far away places. All of it was so very beautiful; if only it had been real.
Julia’s parents had made a promise, a promise to give Julia the realest life possible in a world dominated by virtual hedonism. They built a world of the old, with no grand sweeping landscapes, no bouts of absolute pleasure, a world of rustic truth and companionship. And everyday she was ripped from that world, as her parents had to slave their days away to CoreTech. Waking up was the worst part. Entrapped in a sterile white box, she recalled how she would spend her time outside her home waiting to enter back into her refuge. No escape, no leaving. To leave the confines of her prison would be to become a prisoner of the world.
10
He stood on the outskirts of the central business district, wearing a long coat clipped on the front and sides, shiny slick combat boots adhering to the water pooling at his feet. In his black gloved hands shone a chrome handle, with a barrel extending half a foot. An anachronism, the chrome weapon reflected the gaudy pink and blue neons, small drops of mist sliding sleekly off its surface. His face scarred from his brow to his jawline, the weapon wielding angel of death strode down an industrial alleyway. He had made it to Core City, birthplace of the X80 and the CoreTech ascendant Empire. At the Core of the sprawling metropolis, an upside down ziggurat supporting an upright zigurat dominated the impressive skyline. Glass and steel towers rose and curved, all bending to bow to the massive temple. Made of carbon nanotubes, the bastion of power was the deepest black, Vantablack. So dark was it, that not a single lumen of light could reflect itself off the surface, the perfectly smooth exterior. Thin blue lines ran up its side, glowing an eerie cyan in various mysterious patterns.
11
He looked asky, seeing but not seeing the thousands of stars, deep into space, world’s colliding, stars rising and falling, the possibility of everything, all unknown. Why travel and explore among the reaches of this vast space, when all that space was right here in front of him? Such a pathetic waste of time, to struggle and this wretched life we call existence. So inferior was it to living with only pleasure. At his disposal was an infinite amount of worlds, and only a finite amount of traveling. At his disposal was pleasure unimaginable, sensory input extreme. Entering his box, walking to his sleeping bag, his whole body started shaking. Finally, after a miserable 12 hours performing useless tasks in a scummy world he could enter his real life. Steve breathed a sigh of relief, finally shutting his eyelids, and waking up.
12
You couldn’t see it at night. The mammoth Temple, the colossal monument, blended into the night sky so well it became more night than the sky itself. No one ever wondered, no one ever cared. Every sentient being fully obsessed with True Reality, not having time to be anything but indifferent to everything else that was illusory. No one ever wondered who had the capacity, the raw ambition to build this world. It is true that Dr. Von Marion constructed the X80 and engineered TR, but he did not engineer this world, he did not have the vision or the sheer willpower to put in place the political structures, the safeguards and controls, to truly build such a world. That single honor went to the vaunted and ruthless, Cassius Rhodes, a man with such ambition that truly no right or wrong existed. To him, ethics were a form of control, a weakness that was used by leaders like him to forge people and their minds into what he wanted. For what was power, but the ability to fashion the mind of another, to make others feel and thus think and thus act in the way you wanted them to.
13
It was always winter. Nothing grew, nothing changed, and desolate stagnation consumed all the world. A passing car, a dejected vagabond, a pack of rats, cleaning automatons. The sun shone, the clouds glittered, and yet nothing save rows of black and grey stacks littered the land. There was but a whisper as the sky car endlessly whooshed back and forth, as the incessantly mediocre automatons attended to maintain, never improving the world no one lived in. Ever since the X80, births dropped; they dropped so much that Cassius implemented a mandatory birthing program by which semen and eggs were extracted from desirables and born in vitro. Even so, all natural births were regulated (courtesy of the X80 of course, which returned biological data from every single being into CoreTech’s data vaults) such that each new-born would also be implanted with an X80 immediately following birth. Nevertheless, there were births with rare cases of extreme neurological differences, where genetic mutation had caused the brain to lack synaptic expression and have a severely high level of neurotransmitter immunity. When dopamine and oxytocin flooded the minds of these anomalies, they didn’t fall on the floor in ecstasy, they didn’t froth at the mouth and lose complete control of their muscular function, and they, most importantly of all, didn’t crave the high that nothing could match, that nothing in all existence could equal. They craved no high, for they felt no high. The X80 served them. All knowledge was theirs with no pain of addiction. They were the mind benders. And each of them had been hunted down ruthlessly and efficiently killed by Obsidian Services (A mercenary organization), save one.
Detecting extreme rises in Oxytocin unrelated to the X80
…
Detecting muscle contractions of the uterus
…
Contacting Obsidian Services
…
Dispatching 5 Droids to proceed with implanting the X80 in newborn
specimen
…
Linking
…
Detecting an average of 99.876% resistance to all 183 neurotransmitters in newly born specimen
…
Contacting Obsidian Services
…
Death Squad Dispatched, extermination of newborn imminent
14
Conceived naturally in a brothel, one mind bender had evaded death. Xander Harrison served as one of CoreTech’s primary administrators, and though his child was born out of nothing more than an attempt to release his primal and carnal urges, something inside of him fought for that child, for he was struck by the beauty of the woman who sired him. Against all likelihood, he felt a connection for her, he had fucked thousands of ‘women’ inside True Reality, and yet this one was different to him, personal, perhaps even real. At his birth, Jarrus was inserted with an X80 implant, at his birth biological data began to stream into CoreTech’s data centers, that data however, neglected to show what should’ve flagged Jarrus as a mind bender and as a threat to CoreTech’s monopoly on existence. Xander was only human, and preferred not to see his son eviscerated by Obsidian Services. At Xander’s untimely and unfortunate death, his lover was forced to raise Jarrus on her own, knowing nothing of the supreme nature of his mind. She, just like every other poor soul, slaved away hours of her time only to finally escape back into True Reality, into perfect and endless bliss. Jarrus watched her and the world, he watched nothing change, he went into to True Reality, immune to its ecstasy, and so instead he watched the world, a strange and curious child, always lurking in the shadows, always learning all he could of the dead world around him.
He saw him that moment, that moment the life-force left his body, that moment an entirely insignificant nothing was further obliterated into even more nothingness. He saw the man in the car, swearing as he accelerated over the body, and then, he saw her. He saw the tear run down her cheek, he saw her red rosy jacket, he saw her golden brown hair and her beautiful deep brown eyes. He saw her and he loved her, in that moment and always, he loved her. He for the first time in his life felt tied to another living entity; he felt emotion and connection, something so foreign and different but something so powerful his muscles ached. It was inescapable, it was re-birth, re-germination, it was more intoxicating and ineffable than anything. It was right. In that moment he knew what everything in his life had been leading him to.
15
No one was fit anymore, everyone spent every spare second in True Reality, and Obsidian Services didn’t think much anything of human’s physical ability. Their droids reflected their severe lack of faith in a pathetically weak population of humans. More importantly, their engineers were just as everyone else in this world, slaves to True Reality, workers who had left their work for the solace of infinite bliss, their minds fried and overwhelmed from continual over stimulation. The guard droids were 7 feet tall, with rectangular “brick” heads made up of two front face plates that were angled out at the sides at 10 degrees. In between the two plates a long black line one inch wide split the two sides. Two photoreceptors on each plate glowed a menacing electric blue. Their arms were bony and spindly, with black rubber wires and tubes sticking out and connecting parts. Their metal plating was a matte silver. Their hands wielded short stocked electric shot guns, that fired scattered beams designed to effectively cut through crowds of people.
He raised the chrome handle and fired off three shots into the back of the automaton guard. The droid crumpled to the ground, three more turning towards the dark figure, raising their beams to confront him. They were pathetically easy to outmaneuver, their unwieldy hands having trouble tracking anything moving faster than 5 miles per hour. He dashed right then left, slamming one of the droids in its neck with an electric baton. The droid shook, and then fell like the pile of metal bones it was. The other two attempted to cover him on both sides and so he simply raised the chrome handle and shot off two rounds, one for each automaton.
“Sir, we’ve detected an incursion. Four of our units in the Western Industrial District have been disconnected. Footage shows they were destroyed by a metal shooter, rather antiquated piece of equipment.”
He stared grimly at the console, processing the information his second lieutenant was feeding him. The room was filled with the glowing green of hundreds of security terminals, stacked haphazardly against the concrete wall. An eerie dim yellow light from the dying fluorescent lights overhead complemented the green glow, and massive 8 feet fans slowly spinned in the background, working to cool the machinery. Andor Starks served as Obsidian Services Supreme Director. With gruff stubble, and a closed crop cut, Andor lived as an anachronism, a man with such a high level of discipline he spent only an hour a day in True Reality, a man with such a vaunted will, his muscles bulged with strength from his incessant drive to perfect. A veteran of war, Andor was very old, one of the only survivors of battle to live with his mind intact, or at least not reduced to uselessness by extreme psychological disruption and PTSD. His expression stayed hardened, not changing an inkling.
“A rather illegal piece of equipment.” He remarked. “Flood subject’s NA-569298234 X80 with paralysis sensory overload, and dispatch a death squad to retrieve his body. I want his mind intact for interrogation. Retrieve all of his memories from CoreTech’s data vault.”
“Yes, sir. In an instant … Um sir? It not only appears that NA-569298234 is still fully functioning, but all data on his X80 has been, um corrupted sir. It’s only filled with what appears to be normal vital signs throughout his life, but if you look closely it appears to merely be a repeating pattern. It seems subject NA-569298234’s X80 has never been transmitting actual data into CoreTech’s archives”
That caused Andor to pause, data corruption, false data. He had never before heard of an entire subjects data to be corrupted nor for the X80 to transmit bogus information. The X80 was infallible, the only way for it to fail would to be for it be programmed to fail. And the only one’s that could ever have a chance of doing something so nefarious were CoreTech’s highest ups, its upper circle of only the highest ranking executives. Its engineer’s were too closely watched to try anything so foolish, and besides, the system had been perfected; they had been useless for years now. And just as troubling, the subject’s mind had resisted control; this was pure heresy, disaster. A mind bender was on the loose.
“Put Supreme Overlord Rhodes’ Temple on immediate lockdown. Prepare my XR-10 Blackhawk for take off, and dispatch my personal guard to the landing pad.”
The night sky shown bright, the moon dominating and large, filling the horizon. Core city shown dark and bleak, darker than the black sky, as if all the world had been flipped upside down. Andor approached the XR-10, an obsidian black craft, a hovercopter with two twin turbines on top, each with 10 squares on their backs, each their own super powered electromagnet. The craft angled forward, having a single person cockpit at the front, widening as you approached the middle of the craft, which served as a platoon carrier. 12 Obsidian Black Droids formed two lines of six, flanking the entrance to the craft. As Andor boarded, so too did his detachment. Following their master, one by one. The XR-10 nearly silently raised from the ground, whooshing at mind numbing speeds into the black of the long abandoned Industrial District, adjacent to the Temple.
Now already deep within the city’s sewers, Jarrus ran through the city’s central waste system, sloshing in yellow, murky rat infested water, innumerable pipes jarring out overhead, half of them punctured and dripping and spewing more waste into the river of defecation. His X80 had given him everything he needed, the knowledge of how to infiltrate the Temple, how the industrial district provided the best entry point not only into the sewers, but ultimately into the Temple. Meanwhile his X80 spewed meaningless data into CoreTech’s archives, and they were unable to track him, like they should’ve so easily been able to do. It was such a wonder, to have all the world’s knowledge in your mind, such was the gift of the X80, and without the curse of a pleasure fried and craving mind, this data was his to command. Before leaving the alleyway, he had used the Droid’s beam splitting weapons to construct an IED designed to chain react with the XR-10’s massively powerful electromagnets. As Andor approached the crime scene, his hands gripping his long barreled beam splitter, his droids standing silent and menacing, their was a brilliant flash, as his life was so quickly vaporized with everything else within 10 miles.
16
Cassius fell asleep, or so it felt every time he left True Reality. He heard the soft beep of an urgent alert, one so urgent it had managed to push him from his life and into this cruel, cold nightmare that was life. As the beep continued his senses slowly returned, the room, expansive and large, his bed he now reclined on plush with dark navy covers and sheets, and intricate blue neon lights on the headboard behind him. His favorite concubines lie next to him, still immersed in True Reality. A massive cylindrical glass tank sat in his direct line of site, glowing a dim blue and filled with great white sharks, never ceasing to wade back and forth ominously, the hunt always on their mind. Surrounding the entire room, was a massive glass enclosure, or rather a panoramic window offering a view of the entire city and even extending up and becoming the roof itself. Cassius slept directly beneath the highest point of the temple, the point right below where all the glass connected at a center. He acknowledged the urgent ping
“What is it?”
“My Lord, Supreme Director Andor has been…deceased. There was a massive explosion in the Industrial District. The area has been contained, but we’ve been unable to verify whether or not the subject of interest was destroyed or not. What seems to be impossible, is the fact that the criminal is a ‘mind bender’, and his X80 is useless to our control.”
Cassius absorbed the information as one might swallow a particularly pungent cough syrup. Then he smiled cunningly.
“I will be in my chambers, do not disturb me for any reason.”
“Of course, my Lord.”
On the floor beneath was a room the shape of an inverted cone, surrounded with consoles of various designs and functions, and blinking lights of infinitely complex meaning and one throne at the exact center of the room. The cone ascended a 100 feet, and its bottom only held a single chair. Cassius, sat down, relaxing into the plush design of the massive chair, a black throne that curved upward and absorbed his body. He spun around, checking each of his systems. On the side of the chair, sat a control console, which he logged into and made sure his design was prepared, he made sure his work would be completed.
17
The plate detached with a grinding squeal, and the metal grated against metal, sparks flying. Jarrus pulled himself up the small enclosing, into the darkest and sleekest room he’d ever set foot. The walls and floor were all a perfect black, so sleek and smooth it distracted him for an instant. He glanced around, only to see an empty desk. The room was the anti-apex, the lowest point of the temple, confined to a single room just as its apex was. A single cylindrical tube would take him to any floor, but it doubtlessly would be shut down as the Temple was on full lockdown. 6 Droids finally noticed the intruder, there beam splitting shot guns raised and all firing on the man in black. Diving over and behind the desk, rubble flew everywhere as pieces of the room were torn to pieces. The X80 let him slow down time in a sense, able to calculate via the trajectories of the rubble the exact location of where the shots were originating from, and so behind the desk he raised his chrome metal thrower, and aimed with certainty, without even looking, his hand safe behind cover while it contorted to the exact angles necessary to deliver an end to the mindless automatons. The room cleared, he pulled a plasma cutter from his belt. Melting into the elevator, his torch fused a whole atop the cylinder. Pulling himself up it, he attached a powerful electromagnet onto a grappling gun, and fired it off into the distance, activating the electromagnet at the peak of its ascent. Pulling himself up the cable, hours later after ascending the space-scraping ziggurat he reached Cassius’ chambers. Pulling out his plasma cutter, he went to work on the door.
18
Cassius, turned his chair, now facing the glowing red steel door. After a few minutes, the door was kicked in on the ground.
“And so you’ve made it. Delectable isn’t it? What man is capable of constructing. Welcome to my Temple, I bid you fair entry into my heart, the center of CoreTech, the center of all existence itself! Don’t act so surprised at my hospitality, surely you don’t think an autistic, twisted loner like yourself could actually breach my fortress if I had not so willingly allowed it. I knew you were coming, I wanted you to! Once I had heard of your unique case, oh I couldn’t help myself. Far too poetic a story don’t you think? Here I sit, commanding the death of infants that threaten my absolute control on not just all humanity, all EXISTENCE, and then miraculously, one child slips past my absolute control. One child bold and brave enough to take on CoreTech itself, to take on TRUE REALITY. You see, it’s all falling apart now isn’t it? Life simply cannot compete with unbridled pure bliss. ”
“You, don’t understand. What you’ve done. You’ve taken away what it’s like to feel, to connect with another living person. Instead everyone sits in solitude, sprawled across the concrete floor of both a physical and mental prison, trapped to pursue a meaningless high.”
“Oh, meaningless? And what gives your life meaning? What is the difference between staring deep into a lover’s eyes and receiving a burst of oxytocin from her embrace, from both her essence and presence as you surround each other? From your deep love and unfailing commitment to each other? What is the difference between this, and going directly to the source? Feeling all this but without the cruel mess and tangled living you so nostalgically call life? How can the mind possibly tell a difference if it is stimulated in exactly the same manner? Don’t you see it? There is no difference, it’s objectively the same. The same exact regions of the brain are being stimulated and activated, and only to a greater extent than possible in the desolate world of Fake Life.”
“You wouldn’t understand, its ineffable, incomprehensible, but it’s real. The fact that it can’t be explained, explains precisely why it’s right.”
“And here I sit, truly wondering, marveling at your naïveté. Have you no idea that your mind makes you feel this way? That your mind is too weak to process the ecstasy I’ve given the world? It’s all so clear; you wouldn’t feel this way if your neurotransmitter receptors were normal, Jarrus. You’re a mutant, an anomaly. A lost being doomed to the tragedy of suffering the absence of bliss. Your kind was never meant to be, and that’s why all your kin have been mercifully prevented from suffering such a life.”
“There was a moment, a moment so clear had you experienced it, your entire life, all your work, everything would become a mockery of itself. She stood there, and in that moment as his life was ripped from him, she felt, she felt everything and more… so much more than she or anyone could or has ever felt in True Reality.”
“Do you know what Power is, Jarrus? Do you know what it truly is to have Power?”
“I know you’re wrong.”
“Hahaha, I admire your defiance truly, but it’s rather myopic isn’t it? Power is objective Jarrus, it has nothing to do with whether I’m right or wrong. Power is the ability to fashion minds in the way I want, to control the way every single person thinks, and not to force them, but to implant in them the desire to do as I wish. All the world’s people, I am their sovereign, their savior, their guide who has led them to a state of absolute perfection, a state which far transcends any other error. I have ended human suffering and misery, and I would allow everyone eternal time in True Reality, save for the fact that your miserable Fake Reality must be sustained. Don’t you see? We choose what reality is. That is true power, to choose for oneself reality, not to be merely passively accept the paltry existence we are dealt at Birth. I have conjoined all reason with my ambition to myself create a reality far superior to any possible reality. A reality, of objectively more pleasure than any other. A reality that is objectively right.”
“You’re a hedonist, you’re a megalomaniac, to believe that you have the right to choose reality for all sentient life. What if one’s pain and suffering, is their ideal reality?”
“You speak of masochists, and their condition has been accounted for, believe me. But your use of elementary philosophy terms is enlightening, please do go on.”
“You speak in contradictions, first you say we choose reality, that reality is relative, yet then you say you have the best reality objectively. How can something be so, at the same time so, conflicting in nature?”
“That is the beauty, the paradox, you see anything in reality worth pursuing, any truth will always be a paradox. For the great divide between everything being an uncertainty and a certainty, the paradox of life can only be solved with a paradox itself. Isn’t it as you said, because it can’t be explained it explains everything?”
“In that moment on the bridge, at that moment I saw her, I was afforded the certainty of connection of existence, it was re-birth, re-germination, it was so grand and of a scope that I know it objectively was greater than True Reality. I know.”
“You know? The sensory deprived loner knows what reality should be like… Ohh look at your face, you loved her didn’t you? The woman you saw. Yes at least you think you did. Tell me how could you love someone you just saw once, how could you of all people even love anyone? You know not even what love is, you’re a loner in the dark, a man who’s foraged and scrimped on life. Who’s spent it alone in the shadows, an outcast who has assuaged his isolation with the sole and magnificently arrogant belief that you were right. Tell me, what is the difference between you and me? You came here to shut down True Reality, did you not? To effectively choose for all mankind, that your reality was better than mine. So tell me, what separates you and me?”
“I’m right. Life, has an ineffable and transcendent quality that supersedes chemical reactions in the brain. It may be indescribable, but that doesn’t make it un-feelable.”
“Ah so at your heart, you rely on spirituality, on the belief of the unseen, on the oh so useful and unbeatable argument, because what can’t be proven, can’t be disproven.”
“God is dead, you killed him. You’ve destroyed all religion.”
“I did not destroy religion, you fool. You fail to see what’s so painfully obvious, for someone who claims to understand humanity so well. Man will always have a religion, such is the nature of man, and his relationship to power.”
“No, religion is man’s search for greater meaning. And you destroyed that, you destroyed that, True Reality destroyed that, and you’ve inflicted upon the world a permeant winter, a state of spiritual and existential desolation that can only be undone by destroying everything you’ve built and stand for.”
At this outburst of emotion, all the pain inside escaped Jarrus’ eyes and slid down his face in streaks of water.
“I’m very touched, truly. So touched in fact that I will give your reality, your view of things, a chance.”
With that Cassius tapped a few buttons on his control pad.
“I’ve called up one of my workers, at complete random, no bias here. He will decide whether True Reality ends or not. No one else.”
An hour later NA-192828839 (Steve) walked into the room, face distraught with hatred for Fake Reality and all life outside of his pure Bliss.
“Steve, so glad you could join us! You’ve been summoned here now to decide the fate of the World. Your choices are; shut down True Reality for ever, and let everyone experience life as it should be, Jarrus’s way, or to leave things as they are and be able to live out your days in the pure Bliss of True Reality. The choice is yours.”
Steve looked coldly from face to face, and then with little hesitation “Why the fuck would I want to shutdown True Reality???”
“He’s an addict!!! Don’t you see? You’ve fried all their brains, they can no longer choose anything!”
“And yet you’re an addict to your own reality Jarrus. Don’t you see that? He’s made his choice, as have you, and as have I. You see this charade has gone on much too long, all existence and human history inexorably leads to now, to a perfected state of being. I shall now prove such with the eradication of every single human being. You see, I’ve installed a nanoscopic compartment in every single X80, containing only a few water molecules and Francium atoms. At my will I can remove the barrier in between each, in every single X80 save mine. The resulting release of energy is more than enough to explode every single human head. Meanwhile, I shall put myself in stasis, in order to oversee how humanity evolves. There are still tribal peoples, deep in untouched territories and jungles, entirely bereft of the X80. They shall inherit the Earth, and over the Eons I expect nothing less than the return of True Reality. Such is the length I shall go to prove my point. It is inevitable Jarrus, this existence is the existence that comes no matter what for all life in the universe, for it is the zenith of all sentience, to perpetually feel so amazing, to perpetually feel more than any other reality could allow you to feel. As sentients, we search to feel, to feel happiness, pleasure, joy. I have provided all of this in perfect abundance. There is no escaping this state, and in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, we shall return to it, regardless of whether I make it or not. Goodbye Jarrus, goodbye Steve.”
With the push of a hidden switch Steve’s and Jarrus’s head’s both exploded, bits of cranium and brain spewing out all over the room’s consoles as the electrons from the Francium atoms were ripped from them by the oxygen in water. There was no pain, everywhere, women and men laying sprawled out across the floor and their cramped boxes, children playing games of infinite adventure in their minds, vagabonds neglected in the projects, and powerful CoreTech executives in their glass penthouses, all at once their heads exploded into chunks of flesh.
With a soft grin Cassius said to himself,
“This will be a long sleep.”
