Inversion - 10

Chapter 10

The cabin sat at the end of a dirt road that barely deserved the name, thirty miles from the nearest town and a thousand miles from anything resembling civilization. Laurel had found it through a classified on a prepper forum: “Off-grid retreat, solar power, well water, absolute privacy guaranteed.” The owner, a grizzled ex-Marine type who went by Hendricks, had asked no questions when Laurel paid for six months’ rent in cash and asked that the location remain confidential.

“Lots of folks come up here to disappear,” Hendricks had said, pocketing the money. “Usually, they last about three weeks. Mountains have a way of making you face yourself.”

That had been the point. The cabin was spartan but functional: one room with a wood stove, a narrow bed, a table, and two chairs that looked handmade. Solar panels on the roof powered the electrics – enough for lights and the portable synthesizer that now sat incongruously on the kitchen counter like something out of a science fiction story. He and Maya had spent weeks miniaturizing the design, trading capacity for portability. It could handle one meal per day, maybe two if he wasn’t very hungry.

Laurel unpacked his few belongings. Books on quantum mechanics and philosophy. A laptop that would probably go unused. Changes of clothes. A box of first aid supplies that might or might not prove useful. Everything fit into two duffel bags, the remnants of a life that was once so much bigger.

The silence was the first thing that struck him. Not the absence of sound, exactly, but the absence of human sound. Wind moved through pine trees. Water trickled somewhere nearby. Birds called to each other in languages he didn’t know. But no voices, no engines, no electronic buzz of modern life. Just the steady rhythm of a world that existed without care for the concerns of humans.

His routines developed quickly, partly out of habit and partly from necessity. Dawn: wake without needing an alarm, the cabin brightening gradually as sunlight filtered through the trees. Morning: batteries still at full charge, synthesizer ready for the day’s single meal. Afternoon: reading, walking, thinking. Evening: wood stove lit against the mountain chill, early sleep dictated by what battery power remained.

The food situation was more challenging than he had anticipated. The portable synthesizer worked adequately with simple items, like apples, rice, and vegetables, that he could pick up in town. But it was draining and time-consuming, and, anyway, the battery rarely held enough charge for more than basic sustenance. He lost weight again, though more slowly this time.

In his third week, he tried fasting for a day. Not from choice – the synthesizer had malfunctioned, leaving him with no processed food and no way to make more until he could make repairs.

He dreaded nausea, the weakness that came with his body’s rejection of normal nutrients. Instead, he felt oddly clear-headed. The constant low-grade hunger he’d grown accustomed to faded to a distant ache, then disappeared altogether. His mind, freed from the complex rumblings of digestion, seemed to sharpen. He spent the day reading Lao Tzu, the ancient text resonating in ways it never had before.

“The sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees,” he read aloud to the empty cabin. The words hung in the air like incense.

Once the synthesizer was repaired, he ate more sparingly. The clarity remained.

Weeks became months. His body adapted to the sparse routine, growing lean but far from weak. His skin weathered from the daily walks in mountain sun and wind. His hair, once somewhat maintained, grew unkempt and long. He looked in the small mirror above the washbasin one morning and saw a stranger looking back – gaunt, hollow-eyed, but somehow more essential than the man who had arrived here.

The academic world felt more and more distant. He thought about Maya sometimes, wondered if she was continuing her research into chirality inversion. Probably. She had always been more tenacious than he was, more willing to fight against the odds. He hoped she was happy, or at least occupied. Occupied was often the best that you could manage.

Spring arrived late at altitude, snow lingering in shadowed valleys well into April. Laurel watched the world wake up around him – wildflowers pushing through dead leaves, streams swelling with snowmelt, animals emerging from winter hiding. The cycle felt profound in a way it never had before. There was something here that field equations could not describe, some fundamental aliveness that existed beneath, or perhaps above, the level of atomic structure.

One morning in May, the synthesizer died. It wasn’t a temporary malfunction this time. It was a complete system failure. The quantum field generators had been stressed beyond their limits, operating for months without maintenance. The display flickered once, showed an error message he didn’t recognize, then went dark.

Laurel stared at the dead machine for a long time. He could probably repair it – the components were simple enough, and he had spare parts back at the university. But that would mean returning to civilization, explaining his absence, resuming a life that no longer fit.

Instead, he unplugged the synthesizer and carried it outside. Behind the cabin was a small clearing where he’d been dumping compost and ash from the wood stove. He set the machine down in the center and considered it from various angles, this device that had kept him alive for months.

Then he went back inside and gathered his remaining supply of processed food – perhaps three days’ worth if he rationed carefully. He ate it slowly, savoring each bite, knowing it would be the last food his body would digest.

When it was gone, he waited.

The hunger returned gradually, familiar as an old friend. His stomach cramped and released, cramped and released. He drank water and waited for the nausea that would signal his body’s final rejection of the normal world. It didn’t come. Instead, something unexpected happened. The hunger faded, not from satisfaction but from absence. His body seemed to forget it needed food, the way a flame forgets to flicker when the wind stops blowing. He felt light, unmoored, as if gravity had loosened its hold on him.

Days passed. He should have been weak, dying, his inverted metabolism consuming itself in desperation. Instead, he felt increasingly present, increasingly aware of the multitude of rhythms that ruled the mountain wilderness. The movement of light across the cabin floor became endlessly fascinating. The sound of his own breathing took on weight and significance.

On the seventh day without food, he walked to a large boulder that jutted from the hillside behind the cabin, underneath an ancient maple. He had passed it hundreds of times in his daily walks, barely noticing its presence. Now it seemed to call to him, its weathered surface inviting.

He sat against the stone and closed his eyes.

The boundary between his body and the world around him began to blur. He could feel the mountain’s slow breathing, the patient circulation of sap in pine trees, the electric conversations of his own cells as they adjusted to a reality beyond normal metabolism. Time stretched and compressed like taffy, seconds feeling like hours, hours passing in the space of heartbeats.

When he opened his eyes, the sun had moved significantly across the sky. He had no memory of sleeping, but evidently, time had passed. His body felt different – lighter, more permeable, as if the strict boundaries that defined individual existence had become negotiable.

The next morning, he did not rise from the boulder. It wasn’t from weakness, but from lack of need. Sitting had become natural, breathing had become sufficient. The tree above him gave him shade, the stone behind him offered its support. Everything else felt superfluous, complications added to a process that worked better in simplicity.

Maya would worry when she couldn’t reach him. Hendricks would eventually come to check on the property and find him here. They would assume he had died, and perhaps in some technical sense, they would be right. But Laurel felt more alive than he had in years, connected to processes and patterns that existed far below the level of conscious thought.

He closed his eyes again and settled deeper into the stone’s embrace. Around him, the mountain continued its ancient work of wearing away and being worn away, patient and persistent and utterly without hurry. For the first time since the night he had stumbled home with a head injury and an idea, Laurel felt at peace.