| Out Of Mind | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 5 2013, 04:20 PM (559 Views) | |
| XTS | Feb 5 2013, 04:20 PM Post #1 |
![]()
"Sometimes you just gotta go for style points."
![]()
|
Fourth Day of the Twelfth Moon Cycle in the Season of Crows (Gregorian Date: December 21st, 2442) Rat liked shiny things. He wasn’t really sure what about them he found so alluring, why he couldn’t help but touch anything that sparkled. Anything small enough for him to hold in his hands, he carried back to his home, in the ruins of a small wooden shack next to the twin metal snakes that stretched onward as far as the eye could see in either direction. Some things, others might find some unknown value in, and he could trade them for a rare treat like an apple or a twinkie. The rest, well, they made his home a little prettier. On this day, though, his love affair with shiny objects would not get him an apple or a twinkie. Instead, it would earn him only questions, and a lot of them. For you see, the shiny object that caught his eye today was a door. No, not a metaphorical door. Well actually, that too. But mainly, it was a real, material door, carved out of a steel so stainless it looked like it could withstand armageddon and come out just as pristine as it had gone in. Which it did. While the door’s shininess had caught Rat’s attention, what held it was the fact that the door was ajar. No one had come out this way in decades: ancestral spirits were said to roam the outer wastes, snatching the souls of anyone foolish enough to trespass on their domain. But Rat had never paid much heed to superstition. He followed only where his nose led him when it caught a whiff of treasure. So that this door was open could only mean one of two things: either there was someone living out here in the wastes...or the door had been open ever since the Great Collapse, and nobody else had come to claim the treasure. Either way, Rat’s curiosity was piqued. He crept forward and put his ear to the crack in the door, listening for the sounds of a large animal whose sleep he might be disturbing. Hearing none, Rat warily gave the door a push with his shoulder. It swung open with barely a squeak, and he slipped inside, and his eyes beheld... Not much, really. There were plenty of little bits and bobs, knobs and switches and dials, but they all seemed to be well embedded in the metallic panels in which they were set: no goodies for Rat to add to his stash. Signs covered in symbols that held no meaning for Rat littered the walls. The colors of the signs had long faded, but to Rat’s sharp eyes, a hint of red bled through on many. Even the seats in front of the panels had decayed, the pads and threads that covered them reduced to little more than dust, revealing the uncomfortable plastic skeleton underneath. To Rat, the open door was an opportunity, but a more scientific mind might recognize the havoc the elements had wrought on the interior of this room, even through that little crack. One object, though, remained as pristine as the door that had let Rat enter in the first place: a circular dais that seemed to be made of glass, though its surface was clear of any warping. Its interior was filled with dots of mysterious blue light, and a large button, glowing bright red, was set in the middle of the circle. A persistent voice in Rat’s head kept telling him to push the button! Push the button! So Rat pushed the big red button. The button shifted hue, from red to a blue similar to the lights inside the dais, and a man appeared out of thin air in the dead center of the dais, inches from Rat’s face. True to his namesake, Rat squeaked and flinched backwards, just catching the edge of the dais and toppling over onto his back on the hard stone floor. “What magic is this?” Rat whispered as he got a clearer look at the man. He glowed from within with that same blue light, and he did not appear to be entirely there, for Rat could see the steel wall behind him quite clearly. The very image of a spirit, if ever there was one. He knew he shouldn’t have intruded upon this haunted ground. He had tainted the spirit’s dwelling, and now it would take his soul as retribution. Rat started pushing himself backward, not willing to take the time to stand so he could turn and run, trying to put as much distance between himself and the spirit as possible. But the blue phantom did not move to give chase. It merely raised a hand to its mouth, cleared its throat - the sound reverberated softly throughout the room, being somehow simultaneously loud enough for the fleeing Rat to hear, and soft enough not to startle him in the least - and began to speak. Twenty-third December, year two-thousand thirty-six, it intoned, with a voice that was clear, calm, and surprisingly human, considering its source. Something inside Rat told him to relax; somehow, he knew that it was only a recorded message, left by another human being with technology that to Rat bordered on magical, but was most definitely not magic. The tests were a success! the message continued, excitement suddenly coloring its inflection. Humans may not have been able to establish a life in space, and we weren’t able to live a stable life underground, but there is now a new hope, for we have turned the key that unlocked the human mind! It was my brain whose depths we first probed; I refused to let anyone else hook themselves up to the machine without knowing whether it would work or not. It took some minor calibrations, but shortly an image appeared on the surface of the portal. The man’s image faded briefly, replaced by another image: that of a wide, leafed tree. At its base was a large hole outlined by the tree’s root structure, and a strange white creature wearing a little coat and a black hat stood on the hole’s cusp, a finger twitching in the universal gesture for beckoning someone forward. The picture dissolved, and the man returned. Down the rabbit hole. I guess my subconscious has a sense of humor. The corners of the man’s mouth twitched upward ever so slightly at this, but they quickly returned to their original position as he continued, We sent a robotic probe in first, of course. As near as we could tell by the readings from the probe, the portal led into a fully material environment, despite the fact that it was generated from nothing but electricity and thought...which, if you want to be technical about it, is really just electricity firing between synapses anyway. Some of the data we were getting was a little weird, but nevertheless, whatever it was on the other side of the portal was capable of sustaining life. We- Something inside of Rat told him to press the button again, and again, and again. The man disappeared, cut off mid-sentence, and did not return until Rat stopped pressing the button. When he did reappear, his hair was longer and he had a scraggly beard that he lacked before. The man began again. Fifth October, year two-thousand thirty-eight. I can’t believe we didn’t see this coming back when the existence of the pocket universes was revealed to the public. We can’t have been that blind...could we? He seemed to be pleading to someone, presumably whoever was watching this. Rat had no idea what he was talking about, so he didn’t have anything in the way of answers for the man. We’ve screwed up our world so badly that everyone has decided to jump ship into a new dimension rather than face that which we wrought. It plays on the same concept as those old shows about space travel used to: the human mind is the final frontier, and a frontier in general that humanity has been distinctly lacking for decades. So everyone has gone down all of those rabbit holes, seeking both escape and adventure, two of the greatest motivators of all time. None of them stopped to realize what would happen to the people whose minds they were entering. Neither did we. We didn’t know the mind and the pocket universe were still connected past the universe’s initial inception... Yesterday I was diagnosed with...a severe case of schizophrenia, at forty-four years old, and with no symptoms at all until the last two years. It can’t be scientifically proven, but I’m quite certain it has to do with all of the people that are running around down there, down the rabbit hole. There actually are other people inside my head, so it makes some sense that I’m hearing voices in it. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t still driving me, slowly but surely, insane. The poetic justice of all of this is that I can’t escape this situation I’ve put myself in, by jumping into a pocket universe. Believe me, I’ve tried. But it seems as if the universe needs the mind responsible for its creation to remain in this dimension, where the connection was established, and it seems to be able to...prevent that person from jumping through a portal, even their own. Much like the rest of this entire field of study, we have no idea how this works. The man sighed, long and deep. So I, and all of the others whose minds have been made real, are stuck with a world the escapists left behind, forced to try to rebuild, attempting to beat the ticking clock on our insanity. My scientific knowledge may not be of much use, I’m afraid. Quantum mechanics and theoretical physics aren’t of much use when you’re just trying to do your best not to starve. But I’ll do what I can. I must, if humanity has any chance of surviving in the universe in which it first appeared. On that, at least, the voices in my head agree with me. That same something within Rat that had pushed the button again made him reach forward and give the button a sharp, clockwise twist. The man disappeared, and the entire dais went dark, even the blinking blue lights that had been blinking since before the Great Collapse. Rat’s thought-companions had heard enough. He turned, retrieved his bag of shiny objects he’d collected on the day, shut the door behind him with a quiet thud, and walked away without a single look back. |
![]() |
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · Turquoise Library · Next Topic » |
| Track Topic · E-mail Topic |
10:54 AM Jul 11
|









10:54 AM Jul 11