Agnosis – Ch. 14

<– Chapter 13 / Chapter 15 –>

In the dark, the substance within the well began to hiss and churn. Dorian could hear the disturbance, the seething, and he took a step back from the ring of stones surrounding the void. Strange echoes bounded off the walls, so that he wasn’t certain where he stood, where Amara had gone. He put up his arms defensively, ready to ward off an attack.

A fountain of stars burst from the well, as bright and blinding as a roman candle. He gasped in surprise and shielded his eyes. The stars sprayed in a tall, slanting arch up toward the bowl of the dome overhead, but instead of falling back the ground, they hung in the air, swirling to the left in a dizzying spiral. Points of light began to carom away and attach themselves to fixed places in the darkness. The spiral thinned to a stream, a trickle, then depleted itself altogether, and when it was finished, Dorian stared up into alien sky, a galaxy of stars he did not know.

Again the well churned and grumbled, and once more heaved its contents into the air. This time it was astrological glyphs, complex mathematical equations, three dimensional terragenic schemes and explosions of wriggling, tumbling twin helices that turned themselves about like earthworms washed out of the ground by storm waters. Some of the symbols Dorian recognized from the rings on Moira Raville’s fingers, but they meant nothing to him. They rose from the well, pulsing constructs of silver and gold light, then streaked away and embedded themselves in the surrounding walls until the surfaces were covered with arcane symbols plotted in curiously alternating patterns that suggested a purpose or meaning Dorian could not fathom.

For a time, there was silence. In the shimmer and glow of glyph and symbol and stars, Dorian cast about until he found Amara. She stood back from him, near to the door they had entered through, watching the thunderous detonations of light and scowling, teeth bared and fingers flexed as though she was greedy with the need to hurt something. On the other side of the room, Moira sat completely still, her lifeless gaze fixed on the floor, her purpose fulfilled.

From the heavy silence a sound began to emerge. At first it was whispers, then a light puff of breeze, then the moan of a steadily rising wind skirling about sharply angled stone. The pristine floor of the temple cracked into interlacing networks of fine rills and undulations, and through the breaks, there appeared plumes and floes of sand. Low, undulating dunes spread across the floor until it was covered completely. The sand was slightly damp, cool and brittle. It crunched beneath Dorian’s feet.

The walls and dome of the temple had vanished, replaced by a night vista of towering ridges, gently sloping valleys and the honeycombed hills of another world. The air was thin and cold, the stars gloriously bright on a field of purple dark. They stood in a sheltered place, a shallow cave, a scallop carved from the rock of an overhanging ridge. Amara pressed herself against a smooth wall of reddish bedrock. Dorian caught her questioning glance and shrugged.

Some features remained familiar: Moira Raville on her throne, a misplaced artifact incongruously set atop a small rise on the outer verge of the cave; the bubbling well delved deep and eternal in the center of the floor, ringed now by rough hewn rocks of russet sandstone; the glowing symbols affixed to the walls that still expelled a faint, effervescent light.

But something else had changed: they were no longer alone.

A man stood a few paces back from the well on the opposite side of the cave. Dorian did not know him, hadn’t seen him arrive, but assumed that he had been vomited up from the floor of the temple just as the sand and cave and alien terrain had been. He was old, thin to the point of emaciation, a bundle of bones. The rags which he wore blunted the sharp outlines of his body in cancerous lumps and cunning shadows. His face was worn and tough, weather-beaten, and his beard long and unkempt, matted with clots of ruddy dirt. There was a wild light in his eyes, a shimmer that made him look fanatic.

The old man bowed his head and clasped his bony hands together before his chest.

Because he was closest, Dorian was the first of them to see the manifestation that crawled up from the well. There was no hiss, no sound of boiling or other hint of imminent arrival this time, only a damp slap of flesh on stone. A shadow emerged from the darkness. First a hand, or what might have been a hand, gripping the border stones. The oily substance of chaos, black and glistening, slithered itself up from the cold dark, fingers and hands, face and eyes, body and legs and feet. The lights all about reflected off its skin in dappled patterns and indeterminate streaks of color. The creature’s ungainly flesh seemed to shift and pulse like a viscous liquid tenuously contained in a latex skin.

It was a man, or the shape of a man, continuously dripping and running and reshaping itself. Dorian took a couple steps back, placing himself between the creature and Amara. For the first time, he reached into his system architecture and uncached a withering series of antiviral scripts, but when he looked down at his hands to get the feel of the renders, there was nothing there. The scripts failed to load inside the mediated environment of the quae-ha-distra.

His pulse thundered in his ears, and he licked his lips. He was defenseless. He might have panicked then, but Amara hissed softly in amazement.

The figure crouching on the lip of the well, gripped the stones with its midnight fingers and turned its shapeless head from side to side. It bent its gaze toward the old man, neck extended, eyes narrowed, hunting. When it had located him, it crawled down from the ring of stones and stumbled toward him with an ungainly, stuttering gait. It took no notice of either Amara or Dorian.

It halted before the old man, uttering a spew of wheezing, coughing gutturals. The old man evidently understood this language, because he lifted his head and answered in a slow and weary voice.

“These are the words of the Helpers given to me for you, to reveal to you your own true heart: ‘When I was a little child and dwelling in my father’s house, and was content with the communion of my people, from our kingdom, our home, my parents equipped me and sent me forth. Of the wealth of our treasury they took abundantly, and tied up for me a load large but light, which I myself could carry: gold and silver, rubies and agates, adamant which can crush iron. And they took off from me the glittering robe which in their affection they made for me and which had been measured and woven to my stature. And they made a compact with me, and wrote it in my heart, that it might not be forgotten: “If thou goest down into the darkling lands, and bringest the one pearl which is in the midst of the sea away from the serpent, thou shalt put on thy glittering robe and thou shalt be content, and with thy brethren, thou shalt be heir in our kingdom.”

‘So I quitted the land of my father and went down with my guardians, for the way was dangerous and difficult, and I was very young to travel it. I went down into darkling lands and my companions parted from me. I went straight to the serpent; I dwelt in his abode, waiting till he should slumber and sleep and I could take the pearl from him. But when I was single and alone and become strange to my family, I dressed in their dress that they might not hold me in abhorrence, and recognizing that I was come from afar in order to take the pearl, arouse the serpent against me. But in some way they found out that I was not their countryman. They dealt with me treacherously, beguiled me with their strange arts and alien ways and gave me their food to eat. I forgot that I was a son of kings and instead I served their king. I forgot the pearl for which my parents had sent me, and because of the burden of their oppressions I lay in a deep sleep. But all these things that befell me my parents perceived, and were grieved for me, and proclamation was made in our kingdom, that one should go forth from our gate and rescue me, that I might not be left in the darkling lands.
‘Thus, they sent to me these words: “Call to mind that thou art a son of kings! See the slavery–whom thou serve! Remember the pearl for which thou wast sent! Think of thy splendid robe which thou shalt wear and with which thou shalt be adorned when thy name hath been read out in the list of the valiant.” Thus came the messenger, bearing these tidings across the lands of the wicked ones, the children of strange signs and symbols, and their savage demons. His voice startled me and I arose from my sleep, and I heard the words of my father and inscribed them upon my heart. I remembered that I was a son of royal parents, and the child of noble birth. I remembered the pearl for which I had been sent, and I began to charm him, the terrible loud breathing serpent. I hushed him asleep and lulled him into slumber, and I snatched away the pearl and turned to go back to my father’s house. And their filthy and unclean dress I stripped off and left it in their country. I took my way straight to come to the light of our home. And the messenger, my awakener, went before me on the road to lead me with the light of his form and the guidance of his voice, encouraging me to hasten and drawing me on with his love. And when I had come again to my father’s house, I put on my bright robe which I had stripped off, but I remembered not its fashion–for in my childhood I had left it in my father’s house. Yet on a sudden, when I received it,
the garment seemed to me to become like a mirror of myself. I saw it all in all, and I too received all in it, for we were two in distinction and yet again one in one likeness. And I saw that all over my robe the instincts of knowledge were working, and I remembered at last the spark that was within me, and the true nature of myself.’”

The tableau, man and creature, froze. The render shifted, warped, and gradually receded until they stood once again within the walls of the temple.

“What does it mean?” Amara said.

Dorian held up his hand to hush her. They were not alone. The creature remained, still with its back to them, waiting for some as yet unsatisfied system parameter. Its gently undulating form wheezed with sticky breath.

“Amara, what do you see?”

“Michael Raville,” she said, speaking the name like a curse. “Why is he still here?”

At the sound of Amara’s voice, the creature made a snuffling noise, scenting the air with its nose. It turned to her, curious and questioning, and began to stagger toward them.

“That’s far enough,” Dorian warned.

But the creature, this thing that Amara recognized as Michael Raville, did not acknowledge him. It brushed past his shoulder as though he was beneath recognition and stopped an arm’s length from Amara, muttering at her a chorus of wet and scudding sibilants

Amara growled. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? I took the quae-ha-distra, just like you asked. Do you even understand the risks we’ve taken for you?”

What was happening here?

The pseudo-Raville answered something short and stern, punctuated by fierce, angry gestures.

“You asked for our help, remember?” Amara barked in response. “We’ve done everything you wanted, and all you’ve done in return is subject us to theatrics. There are men trying to kill us!”

At that, the creature extended a hand to her, palm up in offering. The hand seemed to be empty.

Dorian thought, Michael Raville?

“No, I won’t take it,” Amara said sternly, and crossed her arms over her chest. “Not without knowing what it is this time. Exactly what it is and what it does. It’s time that you were honest with me if you expect me to help you. I want the truth.”

Dorian could only guess at their conversation from Amara’s side of the exchange. But she saw Michael Raville, heard him speaking to her, while Dorian experienced only the amorphous render, malformed and speechless. It hadn’t even recognized his presence within the environment. Something about the configuration of his foam and the way the orb had appended to it was interfering.

But why now? How could he exchange meaningful variables with the index, load the application he had selected, and see the render of the old man that must be, he realized, Eliahu ben Hai, but not participate in this? What was different about the creature, the chaos as Moira had called it, from the well?

Except the fact that everything else to this point had been scripted events in an inflexible datascape.

Dorian sucked in a breath, remembering the well and his initial reaction to it, the way it had called out to him, as though it was a living thing, structures and information crying out to be given form. Chaos. Absolute potential. Raw architectural objects.

It wasn’t that he was perceiving too little, he realized, but too much. His compilers were translating beyond the code that rendered this tightly simulated environment and showing him the naked core of the dataverse, the mathematical dance of signal packets redundantly broadcast through a wall of noise. He was geeking the environment’s pure binary information–a thief in the treasury of the king.

That was why Raville had sent him here. Not to interrogate Moira or to swap incriminations with a script of Raville’s virtual self, but for the well, the mainline straight into the orb’s sacred datacore and the secrets Raville sought to keep even from himself. And not as dead text, but as fully compiled executables, as a simulated reality within his own foam that Dorian could manipulate.

It was freedom.

But the well was empty. All that it was, all that it contained had been drawn into the form of the creature that had emerged from it, a living representation of the pleroma.

He remembered Moira’s words: When you make the two into one, when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, the above like the below, when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, and when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the kingdom.

Male and female. One and zero. One image subsuming another.

He understood in a flash of sickening insight.

Slowly, Dorian wheeled toward Amara and the proto-Raville. She was growing increasingly hostile, spitting her responses like venom and pressing toward the creature as though she meant to rend him with her claws. “No, I want a better answer than that. I won’t be your pawn anymore. I want the truth, not more riddles and lies. I won’t accept it until you tell me more. John!”

He heard her call his name, but he hardly acknowledged her. His mind was full of possibility, grinding through the calculations. Raville was trying to give her something. Some code object he could not see, could not evaluate. A potential threat, but also an essential artifact. Raville had sent them here for this too. To receive on faith what they might not accept on knowledge and exotic proofs alone.

“Take it,” he said. “Do what it asks.”

Amara’s brow creased skeptically, but she wavered between trust and treachery. She flicked her gaze from Dorian to Raville, and sighed. She put out her hand. “Fine. Give it to me.”

The creature pulsed with satisfaction and reached out to her.

And Dorian crept up stealthily from behind while the creature was distracted, completing its transaction with Amara. At most, the core perceived him only as a transient aberration in the digital stream, but Dorian remained cautious. Some things demanded stealth. The instinct, the protocol was etched deep in the human heart.

Amara glanced up at him, wondering, he was certain, what exactly he was doing. He couldn’t tell her. Wouldn’t have told her even if there had been time. It would have horrified her.

A render. The whole environment is a render. None of it is real, just the representation of a technical, mathematical process.

Dorian thought it, repeated it, made himself believe it.

And then he gripped the soft, viscous head of the creature in his hands and wrenched it back until the black eyes stared up at him. It made no sound except a moist and spongy wheeze, but there was a glint of awareness, a cascading cognition of environmental malfunction, the idiot instinct of a finely crafted codework inexplicably hauled out of its standard routines. Dorian found the shimmering, pulsing hollow between shoulder and throat, the vulnerable flesh of an impossible being, and lunged at it.

He bit down, pierced the thin skin with his teeth and sucked.

Amara screamed, and Dorian could only imagine what it was that she saw.

His mouth filled with the taste of ash, of oil, of rotten things and thick, poisonous fluids. He choked on it, vomited up black liquid data and forced himself to swallow it again. Suck and swallow, to devour the whole of it.

The data form of Raville reacted. Perhaps it read him as a potent viral assault, a signal leech, a ravenous invader in the fields of plenty. It fought against him with powerful hands, pistoning its legs and twisting its body, trying to writhe free. It launched itself against him in a frenzy, pushed him back toward the well, to safe forms and lockdown applications. Dorian clung to it with all the strength and ferocity he possessed, attacking its neck, its face, its chest–anywhere he could find a soft place to bite and suck. It tried to strike out at him, but Dorian restrained it, grappled with its limbs, and finally put all his weight against its back and bore it to the ground.

The creature writhed beneath him in desperation.

Dorian straddled its torso, let it kick and struggle all it wanted, then used its own slithering resistance to flip it over onto its back. He held its arms apart and knelt over it, went at the throat again. The construct couldn’t resist him. He was stronger, faster, more agile.

Dorian took the thing into his mouth and consumed it one swallow at a time. Suck and swallow, over and over, contemplating only the mechanical process of what he had to do. It struggled less and less as the moments passed. Its strength waned, and it clawed weakly at the air. Finally, it mewled at him, gazed at him with an empty and uncomprehending expression.

But Dorian sucked until long after it had ceased moving and the light had vanished from its eyes.

When he was done, nothing remained but a pale, translucent skin like the deflated bladder of a waterskin and a drying spatter of fluid that had leaked from its many wounds. Dorian staggered to his feet. He wiped his sleeve across his mouth, and it came away stained with black and greasy liquid. His stomach felt heavy, filled with lead. His clothing was disheveled and torn, smudged with the digital gore of the datascape he had consumed.

Devoured.

He was sure he would vomit again. Any second now.

But it had been worth it.

He had taken the sacred datacore into himself and assimilated it into his own foam. The quae-ha-distra held no secrets he could not discover. It no longer owned him. He had consumed it.

Still scrubbing at the raw data that covered his face and hands, Dorian looked toward Amara. He felt a stab of shame. Not simple embarrassment, but something darker, hideous, as irrefutable as guilt. She had scrambled away from him and put her back against the outer wall.

Her face was a mask of horror.

“Data,” he croaked at her. His tongue tasted like ashes.

“You’re covered in blood.” She turned her head away, unable to stand the sight of him.

“It was data,” he repeated dully. “Just data.”

I did it for you!

She did not respond. He was covered in blood. What should he expect her to say?

“I have what we came for,” he whispered. “Let’s get out of here.”

<– Chapter 13 / Chapter 15 –>