Ch 109. The World at the Boundary (Patreon)

A thorough scouting of the lower levels of Nemedias was a decent way of bringing my mood up for the day, but as evening drew near I had become tired and started yawning.

Voltara and I returned to the Lawmaker's tower dormitory and settled on our respective beds.

I stretched out, drew the curtains shut and dove into my soul.

. . .

All four versions of me were sitting behind a dusty table within the interior of Chernobyl staring at each other.

"Let's review our progress," I said to the other three versions of myself.

"Soul stability is increasing," Junezia reported. "If we keep going we might actually be able to get more restarts..."

"Question?" Juneberry asked.

"Yes?" Junezia looked at the Searcher.

"Infi said that there are infinite Earths being made and dying inside Eureka," Juneberry said. "Can we maybe connect to one of them without any mirror-breaking? Not as a point of rewind, but... to simply see what's out there. I want to know if what Infi told us is true. I want to peer through the eyes of another possible Juni, to see it for myself. I want to know how far we can reach across infinity."

"That sounds... extremely dangerous," JP bared her sharp teeth with a malicious smile. "I like this plan."

"It's dangerous and yet you like it?" I blinked at phantom-me.

"If there's an evil Juni behind the mirror I could eat her," JP grinned, her jet-black hair threads fluttering through the air.

"And what if there's a good Juni there?" Junezia asked. "Then what?"

"Then we make another best friend!" Juneberry declared with a decisive hand-clap. "If she's a wizard she could teach us advanced magics! Sha-zam!"

"We don't know how the mirrors work," Junezia said.

"Yeah we do," Juneberry waved her hands. "We have two open mirrors already. One leading back to our original Earth and another leading to the Dead Zone!"

"Lets make a vote," I offered. "Raise your hands if you agree to open another mirror to..."

Everyone's hands were already up including my own.

"Great," I rolled my eyes. "I don't know why I even bothered with a vote, we're all Juni."

. . .

The storm shook my lander, pelleting it with endless grey rocks and dust, pieces of debris striking against the glass with endless plings.

The noise of the rocks slamming into the ship was giving me a pulsing migraine.

"Get it together Cali," I rubbed my head tiredly staring at my pale reflection in the glass.

Jumps across the vastness of the void had always been a pain, had always messed with my mind, nearly made me forget who I was and where I was going. Only a few stratonavigators like myself, a few people out of millions had the neural-pattern necessary to direct the dark matter engine to make successful leaps from planet to planet without crashing into a star or getting lost in eternity.

“Cali Terri,” I read the words on the name-tag of my gray suit. “Werth Stratonavigator 20471. Deep Search Project.”

I slowly recalled things as my mind emerged from the soup of parallax fractals, pushing itself against the resonance of the void. I was a free stratonavigator. I chose this fate, chose to leap forward into the unknown, to find a world for Werth people to resettle to as our own atmosphere was rapidly decaying away.

Since 2248 Werth has been plagued with one disaster after another. We had successfully repelled a multitude of invaders, blocked the gateways, sacrificed our cities, lost most of our population... but now our planet itself was dying and I was Werth's last hope.

I slowly remembered more things. This was my 808th jump.

I had already encountered numerous dead words. I was seeing a pattern and I refused to believe it. 

I suddenly recalled that I chose to persist in my Search even when I stopped receiving signals from Werth.

I turned to the panel and tried not to cry. The Werth beacon was silent, I had received no messages in 2 months.

I looked out the window. The grey mush was still there.

The waiting was a pain. I leaned back on my chair and waited for the storm to end.

Time dragged on and on, until finally I saw that the gray dust released me. I sighed in relief as I saw the horizon turn from grey to white, the sun starting to break through the clouds.

The storm was over, and I was finally free to step out of the lander.

I put on my suit and helmet and opened the hatch.

The air was still and silent, and the sun shone through the dust. I took a deep breath of oxygen generated by the suit and looked around.

The land was rugged and desolate. A massive, planet-wide wall of gray clouds was moving away, revealing more of the landscape beneath it.

I took a few steps away from the lander, feeling the ground beneath my feet. I was weary and tired, but I tried to stay positive.

The supercell storm moving away from me was definitely something to behold. It was something new, something that wasn't documented on this planet. According to the infodeck Laiternia was a green planet covered in delta rivers and gardens, a perfect world for farming, gambling and...

It was anything but. Gray dominated the landscape. I couldn't spot a single tree or a river. Laiternia was nothing but a wasteland, a gray desert extending as far as the eye could see.

I took a few steps in the direction of the horizon, unable to comprehend what I was seeing. Laiternia looked like a world that's been forsaken, abandoned millennia ago.

The cloud moved further back, revealing structures buried in the grey sand. Skyscrapers!

My mouth fell open. I saw this city in the infodeck brochure. It was the capital of Laiternia.

I walked towards the ruins of a once thriving city. The buildings were still standing, but they were crumbling and covered in dust.

I couldn't believe it. What had happened here? Where had all the people gone?

My heart raced as I carefully navigated the ruins.

I entered the silent skyscraper. The lamp in my helmet ignited, a beam of light cutting through the gloomy interior.

The walls were covered in dust.

I looked around, taking in the scene. There were no signs of life. Old furniture and dead computer terminals were scattered around the room, but there were no people. This was once an office.

I pressed forward, heading down the stairwell into the depths of the building.

[NO LIFE SIGNS] The scanner on my wrist clicked when I ran the scan.

I continued my descent. There were more offices in the lower floors, just as abandoned and empty.

Darkness pressed from all sides against me as I had gone beneath all of the windows, into the floors buried deep in the grey sand.

I saw the body of man.

[NO LIFE SIGNS] The scanner clicked.

I approached the body. It looked wrong. Looked like it had leaned against the wall and melted into it. The three piece suit was intact, but the flesh of the man stretched into all directions, becoming a tree-like fractal structure spreading into the wall.

I backed away, feeling my skin crawling. What the shit had happened here?

I didn't know what was going on, but I knew one thing.

Laiternia was lost.

I turned. My light revealed another person fused into the wall.

[NO LIFE SIGNS] The scanner clicked again.

I wanted to run, wanted to get away from this nightmarish vision... but I also had to take a sample, had to see if this was a pathogen of some sort, had to know the truth.

I reached for a sample container on my belt and pulled out a knife. I stabbed at the flesh of the man that had turned into a tree, trying to scrape a bit of it off.

The man's eyes suddenly opened. They were grey, deprived of moisture, formed from fractal patterns of moving dust that glittered in the light of my lamp.

I jumped back in surprise, dropping the sample container.

I pointed the scanner at the man that stared at me.

[NO LIFE SIGNS] It declared, as if it was taunting me.

The dead man's mouth moved, slowly opened like the petals of a flower, unfolded to reveal pulsating, gray flesh.

"Welcome to Laiternia," he said.

I felt my heart stop.

"W-what the fff-fu..." I muttered, frozen on the spot, unable to move.

The dead man's mouth moved again.

"A polite lady should not swear," the corpse said in a casual tone.

"Y-you are dead," I said. "T-this isn't real."

"I am only technically dead," the man affirmed. "This is real."

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I mean, here I was, standing in a room filled with dead bodies, and one of them was talking to me!

I felt my heart racing, my stomach turning.

"W-what happened here?" I asked, my voice trembling.

"Time," the corpse said. "Time turns all to dust."

I just stared at the corpse, unable to comprehend what I was hearing.

"How are you talking to me? W-what the shit is this?!" I sputtered.

"I still got my Save Point," the man said. “I cannot die until it runs out.”

"W-what?" I asked.

"Laiternia was a paradise made for me," the corpse said. "I can't die until the Save Point subscription ends. I'm... everyone here. My name's... Lattimus Sconch."

I scrambled away from the corpse, limping towards the stairwell.

"Do you mind not leaving? It's nice having someone to talk to who can still move," the body of the woman fused to the floor near me spoke, dead, glistening eyes looking up at me.

"W-what?" I froze again. "What the shit are you?!"

"Lattimus Sconch," the woman's ossified body said. "My name is Lattimus. Please don't run away. I'm... a citizen of Eureka."

Something shattered inside of me with a twinkle as the corpse uttered the name. I blinked.

I was... something other than myself. Something greater. I was Cali Terri from Werth and I was Juni Tokimorimïtul from Andross and I was Yulia Ishenko from Earth.

I choked, my mind processing this new, impossible information.

After a minute of hyperventilating, I sat down on the floor and stared at the corpse. All of the terror I felt before had drowned in the sudden, new realization of self, in the possibility of other me-s existing in other places elsewhere beyond the stars tied to me with a chain of Infinite Mirrors.

"Lattie," I said. "Tell me everything from the beginning. I want to know how you got to this sorry state."

“I worked as a Eureka project Admin. A Director of Human Resources,” the corpse said. “I saw an ad for a game… a perfect world made entirely for me, where I could be anyone... Everyone. I bought it. This is my perfect world…”

“You wanted to be a bunch of corpses fused to the floor?” I asked.

“No,” Lattie replied. “Laiternia wasn’t always like this. There were oceans and rivers and forests… I thought that it would stay this way forever… but my world’s subscription ran out. I thought that it wasn’t a big deal… but I was wrong. I got a notification that… my paradise has been discontinued, that its narrative will now be tied with all of the other... indebted worlds. That unless I pay up, I will be gated out. The bastards gated me out.”

I thought of Werth and of how my own planet had inexplicably, slowly decayed away. How I had become a stratonavigator to find a new world for humanity to flee to. How I jumped from world to world to find only death and decay.

I now knew that there was nowhere for us to relocate to.

Eventually every world here would collide, crash into the barrier wall, become part of the Dead Zone.

“I… I’ll be back,” I told Lattie. “Just wait… I’ll get you out of this place, I promise!”

I rushed up the stairwell, ran across the desolate desert, got into the lander and procured my backup suit. In about an hour I was back to the room filled with corpses.

I slowly, meticulously carved the thin, skeletal body of the dead girl out of the floor with a plasma knife and enclosed her in the space suit.

“Will you remain yourself, if I take you from here?” I asked.

“Yes,” Lattie said. “These bodies are all me, so I can move between them. This was the setup of the game. It was how I coordinated, set up events on my planet for myself to enjoy. It was my perfect lucid dream...”

I tied the suit filled with the thin, dusty corpse to my back and began to ascent up the stairwell.

“Are you still with me?” I asked through the speaker.

“I am,” Lattie responded, her voice fuzzy with static.

“Great,” I exhaled. “My ship’s engine can leap across the universe. I can try to get you back to Eureka. Maybe you could…”

“I don’t think Eureka will let me back in,” Lattie sighed. “I’m broke. I spent all of my savings on my paradise planet. I’m certain that someone else has my job now.”

I growled and stopped my stride, pondering my options. I didn't have the coordinates to jump towards Eureka and jumping blindly could take me deeper into the Dead Zone. If there was no way forward, no way back to the core… only one option had remained.

The option, the path towards my other reflections... towards a teenage girl version of me that lived on a world that resisted death, fought back, survived against all odds.

“It’s fine… this is fine... we’ll try to get through the Dead Zone,” I said, tears raining down my face. “We’ll try to find my Sunshine Archipelago… I think I know the way there. I think I can get us there, past the barrier wall… to the magisphere of desire. You just have to persist until then. Can you do that for me Lattie?”

“I am not sure,” Lattie said. “There is only a few months left on my Save Point. But… I do want to see worlds beyond our stars.”

I climbed back into the lander and slammed the metal door shut.

I belted Lattie to a wall, slotting the suit upright and looked at the navigation panel.

I had to make another jump. A completely blind one, based purely on the location that was tagging at the Infinite Mirror within my soul. A jump that would get me out of the doomed worlds plummeting to their end, out of this place… out of Eureka’s grip, past her walls.

I started to type numbers into the panel. I had to get it right. The Infinite Mirror gave me a chance, gave me a way out. I finished the launch sequence, tied belts around my body and pressed my hand into the panel.

“Activate the jump!” I growled and the dark matter engine behind me folded into itself with a deafening hum that multiplied again and again until I knew no more.