Looming

This time oblivion had a periwinkle hue. A void rolled out from the heavens, tempting and teaching simultaneously like so many inedibles arranged on a great sheet, bound at four corners, displayed before St. Peter. Whether a confrontation with the divine or a mere delusion, Peter had wielded virtue and wisdom and focus in his trance, but Sarah found herself wholly distracted in hers, and crushed by immeasurable dread.

You live in the collapse. You’ll never understand context.

The words haunted her, hunted her, and she’d run from them, fleeing ever deeper into the machine. It wasn’t what they meant that terrified her — for she had no idea what they meant — but how they were said, and by whom. Jaxom was eight. He had no business saying such things, let alone with such a stark, solemn, mature poise. Gone was her adorable weirdo son. The machine had stolen him bit by bit, until finally he’d stopped talking entirely. She was determined to steal him back.

Last time she entered the machine she'd been entirely unable to use it. It was just bright lights in the dark, blurred and distorted as if viewed through water droplets dripping down a window on a rainy night.

This time, whether by sheer force of will or by some adaptation she’d gone through since then, she had more success. Slightly. What she sought in the chaos remained beyond her grasp, but her grasp was steadily expanding. She sat on the edge of reason, lost in an endless maze of shifting realities, following Jaxom’s trail through vague impressions and maternal instinct.

She bounded through the void haphazardly, drifting peacefully for as long a distance as she could manage before finally being drawn back in by some unknowable force to collide with the tapestry — that great vital energy which stretched out beneath and behind her, splitting into uncountable branches. In those moments of collision each wild flailing grip of her soul onto thread rendered forth a new surreal and tumultuous reality, sending cascades through the void in every direction that rippled with strange shapes and colors. Usually what she saw was utter nonsense, mere white noise, but very rarely a blip of a few recognizable things would appear before being abandoned in her wake.

The tapestry granted a kind of absolute power in this place, yet offered no control, hinted at no meaning, suggested no order. Any sense of the passage of time eluded her, but having no material body hadn’t saved her from eventual exhaustion. Every touch quietly sapped her, every sideways glance at the turmoil behind gently nudged her further mad. Still a deep and stubborn determination drove her on. In spite of the madness, her link to what she considered the real world remained unsevered, as did her link with her son. I won’t lose you to a damned game.

But her deepest devil questioned. This is just a game, right?

A second wind blew through her when she spotted something orderly lost amongst the chaos. An oasis in the desert, a contrasting light that chased away the devil with a beauty that set something inside her back in order. Heaven.

She had crossed countless fragments of somethings that never were on her journey while remaining unenticed, yet this place beckoned of deeper things, and its whisper wasn’t one of temptation but of wonder, love, and belonging. Stunned, she tumbled past and interrupted its rendering, leaving it to disintegrate behind, abandoned in the ether like so many nothings before it. But discarding it felt wrong, and even its brief memory lingered like a siren’s call.

She yielded to that call and dug her will deep into the tapestry to pull it taut, determined to roll it back towards Heaven. To her ceaseless surprise it continued to oblige.

Chaotic energies reversed their paths and coalesced back into trillions of emergent properties, each following their host-thread and setting about the work of rebuilding the place around her, this time uninterrupted. Swathes of light and matter all found their place and banished the void piece by piece, as if fitted and cast into whatever mold was determined for them by the threads she wielded. It was an image unlike anything witnessed in the world she’d called “real” before. Like many truths, it remained unimaginable right up until it was, and then the force of its existence made its prior vacancy equally unimaginable.

Now Heaven was coming back together. She was greeted first by a distant bruised sky and then by a row of vibrant trees as they reformed a dozen feet ahead of her. Golden glyphs of a language she didn’t know marked the forming of each new layer. She wasn’t sure when, or if ‘when’ was even a notion, but upon the resolution of one layer or another everything became suddenly whole and perfect.

Rosen leaves rustled even as the wind whispered promises of wisdom, butterfly wings pulsed with a charming turquoise iridescence, chalky boulders of royal white lined a sandy shore ahead and hummed a deep and solemn hymn. A pool of cool still water lay in front of her, never moving but seeming nevertheless to lap against the shore rhythmically. Her heart rocked with those never waves, riding a tide of stillness, and crashed upon the rocks at once, sending up a fine spray of spirit. She was rippling and pearlescent and free at first but increasingly bound to the body at last, materializing enough to take a breath of fresh air, crisp like winter wind but soothing and warm. Toes. I remember having toes. Her feet met soft dewy grass.

She took a step forward as her body recovered from the bizarre transition between immersions, but halted in surprise when she caught a glimpse of soul upon the dancing shore. A face. Vibrant, happy, wearing a crown of golden braids, adorned with two joyous orbs of galactic light that studied her for only a moment before writing a love letter with an impish glimmer. A reflection on the water. Me. Before motherhood. The ego has a kind memory.

The air was charged with a peculiar magic which called up a deep nostalgia, like she’d always belonged here and been long absent. This place was not Heaven because of some mathematical precision or perfection, but because tuning it any further towards such a thing would steal from it that which made it most unique: Hope, as far as one could see.

The world outside the machine felt like a distant dream by comparison. Obviously false. Much too loud to be real. Belligerence, yelling, demands — all the ways our senses accost us incessantly — now seemed just the tell-tale signs of a lie. Old bodies now appeared as mere prisons designed to keep us locked in the moment, shackled to the material and linear and the temporal. But this place never yelled. Instead it gently hummed a song we all know, which no-one wrote. The tune inspired thoughts like meekly whispered truths, unfathomable and self-evident, and all at once the burden on her shoulders felt too great to bear. It seemed impossible to leave, sinful even. But I have to.

A war began within her, threatening to tear her apart from the inside, weakening her already-shaky grip on the tethers that bound this moment together. Even as the world began to decay in angst, a soft hand clasped hers and tightened around her fist and the threads it bore. “Mom. I knew you’d come here. I knew you.”

Her incredulity nearly broke her. The burden that had just threatened to crush her now threatened instead to lift her up and carry her away on crazy winds. She managed an anguished “What?” before releasing the threads and collapsing into Jaxom, weeping. Little as he was, he stalwartly held the threads, and her. “It’s okay, mom.” But his voice still bore that stoic and alien mark which had hunted her to here, and his attempt at comfort wound up causing further weeping.

Through teary eyes she beheld a flower as it sprouted from the ground beneath them, blooming an electric blue. The flower’s beauty rebuked her grief, and she calmed and collected herself, standing upright once more. “I’ve been looking-” She began, but he cut her off with a gentle “I know, I saw.”

A myriad of questions welled up in her, entirely sensible. Driven by maternal instinct, she’d have looked for him for eternity, but now she feared she had actually found someone else. “If you saw, why did you run from me? Where were you going? What’s happened to you!?” It would’ve been a yell, but for the flower which rebuked her anger at betrayal too, and left it more a whimper.

“Happened to me? It happened to us all, long ago, and there has always since been a silent war waged between the old and the young. The tapestry of time is speckled with a series of cyclical battles, with many casualties. Rare tenuous peace treaties often follow, maligned by brief segregations in the form of daycares and nursing homes and their ilk. But your generation finally built a lasting — if silent — peace by neatly bundling us all into spheres of influence and opinion, organized away from each other by carefully crafted algorithms. We’ll never address the problem, let alone resolve it, because we prefer that most human methodology. Avoidance. This way the old can rant about how naïve the young are in their sphere, the young can laugh at how stubborn the old are in their sphere, and neither can hear the other. There’s a gaping chasm of experience and rebellion between us. Oddly, it’s not so bad knowing that in time we’d sync up with each other, if only for a few years. But I wanted to fix it anyway, because I love you. So when I found this game I set out to build a place where we could really talk to one another, where you could really understand me.” He stared blankly for a moment, thinking.

She shook her head, shocked that he offered an actual explanation, scared of how much sense he was making, scared more that her little boy was gone and replaced by this sober old man. A hint of something else lurked just beneath his eyes. He continued. “But in my efforts first to build, instead I found things. Things I didn’t build, things I couldn't conceive, that lay deeper in the dark, deeper even than this place, which itself is out of its own depth. I must take you there, because I want to show you a question so that I can ask it.”

Though surrounded by perfect comfort, his words evoked in her a primal fear. They stood at the edge of a precipice, and he wanted to jump off. Rattled, her instinct to bark a motherly command to retreat fought against curiosity. Overwhelmed, something churned in her gut, but the beauty of the flower calmed her enough that she reasoned with him, stalling. “Okay. I’m here now, I can understand you like you wanted. You know I was always listening, right? And… why are you talking like that? Did you eat a dictionary?” She smiled nervously, trying to conjure up memories from outside.

“It’s not me. This place translates, and whatever I say comes out as its own truth, never held back in the slightest by my ignorance or yours.”

Yet she discerned plainly that there was something he wasn’t saying, something that scared him. Mechanical as his voice remained, melancholy and dread and wonder all began to be mixed up on his face and poured out in brief stints as winces in wide eyes, subtle clenchings of the jaw, and twitches in lips ever so slightly too taut. Yeah right you’re no different, where’s your jittering joy, your innocence, your ADHD?

“It’s all still there, you just haven’t learned to see it yet.” He responded, though she’d said nothing aloud.

A tension grew between them at this, and the air swelled heavily with spice such that it almost burned her mouth with every breath. “But this place isn’t real. You have to come back with me to the real world, okay?” I’m still your mom, old man, do what I say.

He smirked briefly at this, tilting his head curiously, and the spice drained from the air. Finally, a sign of humanity. She burst into tears again, this time accompanied by a sigh of relief and a hearty laugh.

But another monotone script spilled forth from him, ruining her moment of catharsis. “There is a notion, old and backward, that virtual things are not real. It’s silly once you think about it for a moment. Why believe your mind's reflection of a bunch of particles moving in one place, but not in the other? Around the time of my birth, there was a transitional point where a whole generation spent most of their time interacting with virtual things, accruing virtual wealth, developing virtual relationships, while also believing these things to be somehow less than real. So they judged themselves fruitless, and carved their own hearts to pieces. But I, and mine, aren’t so easily duped by tradition.” He gestured about him broadly. “This is the real world. You know it is, deep down. And isn’t it nice? We can’t stay for now though. My question bears vital consequences, I must ask it.”

Before she could reply he began to speak again, but this time with no words, and the world shook. The stroke of a brush rent heaven in twain, spilling forth a familiar periwinkle light in vast shafts that shredded everything they touched back into particulates. His small hand stretched out with uncanny confidence and tore the rent further.

“Stop, we can’t stay, we need—” The light obliterated them both, and they were encompassed by the void once more.

“In order to ask, I must show. You’ve been treating the threads like ropes, and then like geometric forces.”

How can you speak with no mouth? She thought, as pointedly as she could manage.

He ignored her question. “I did that too at first, but I discovered that really they’re more like a song. Sing a harmony or a melody and you make something real, sing discordantly and it collapses again. But there are worlds in the notes you don’t sing, as much as in the ones you do.” With this, he sung a quiet chorus, and the threads oscillated at his frequencies. She knew no way to interrupt.

Objects began to appear around them, shaking violently, morphing and fading between variants of themselves. Maple, oak, pine. Sparrow, robin, dove. Occasionally glimpses into full and internally coherent worlds were caught in the midst: The subtle green haze of a storm, pierced by the glint of light on wet leaves as they danced in the wind, an accompanying rumble of thunder, petrichor. A masterfully crafted golden bull covered in runes and symbols, held in a tender right hand whilst the left dutifully scrawled notes in a tome with a quill pen, until some secret was discovered and the bull tossed into a pot of roiling magma, filling its den with thick smoke.

Mountain, valley, plain. Sunlight, moonlight, twilight. The glimpses grew faster, somehow telling of more with less: Rain droplets clinging to stem and branch, recasting the light of the sun as their own, mocking nature's littlest stars. A blackened blood-like ichor dripping down the edges of an ornate pillar made of gluttony. Little fluffs falling from crying trees. A field sowed with stolen seed. The ghost of a sunset.

The threads which bound reality together dissipated into dust, and the dust drifted along in non-Euclidean paths vaguely swirling around some central figure in limbo. A yawning maw casting eclipsing shadows darker than the void from a lightless throat, pouring forth deafening discordant notes, each with a life of their own, which hunted down any sensible tune Jaxom hummed and drowned them both in nonsense. Something peered at them from nothing with a matrimonious glare that said “you are mine, we are now bound forever.”

Sarah could hardly keep up with the chaos and went to clench her eyes shut as tight as she could, only to discover that she didn’t have eyes. This new unfathomable thing accosted her, a reality unavoidable, untunable to the song, and the deeper they glided towards its source the more the guiding beauty of heaven’s flower fell away from memory. She screamed, but no sound came out.

“It’s okay, mom, listen to my voice, follow my voice. There’s a pattern.” He sounded almost like her son now, and she was comforted enough to notice. It also helped that he was right. The pattern was invisible at first, then subtle, then obvious. They were trending towards something, but it remained obscured from her.

“See it? What is that?” He asked, while pointing out nothing.

Emotion and pain and instinct roiled within her, tugging in different directions. What is what?! Somehow, she perceived that something heard her cry. Turn it off, stop it, you’re hurting me, take me back! Pain nearly won, but a defiant roar followed. If you hurt my son I’ll end you! This battle cry overwhelmed the din, and the chaos collapsed back into a simple, comforting, empty void.

“What do you mean? You didn’t see it?” Jaxom asked in the same calm tenor, apparently unconcerned.

Suddenly, words. Aloud. “Listen, you may still think I have all the answers, but I don’t know what you’re doing. I hardly even recognize you. Are you my Jaxom? What happened? Are you a thousand years old or something? We’re leaving. Now.”

An eerie silence settled on them and demanded not to be broken. The stillness perturbed her. She would’ve pulled him out by force if only she knew how.

“I can’t go, mom.” He broke the silence. “I made a man. In another, smaller place. I put him where I thought he’d be happy. He wasn’t. He asked me things I didn’t know. I thought I understood what he was, like my other toys. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I didn’t mean for him to hurt himself. He won’t stop until I give him answers, so I yelled into the void.” His voice cracked and broke her heart. After a moment his voice returned, harrowing. “It answered.”

She couldn’t see him, but knew he trembled.

“Nothing it showed makes any sense. And it’s a thing you have to see to question, a kind of pattern that runs through everything. Didn't you see it?" He waited for a response while she played out a million escape scenarios in her mind. Eventually, he continued. "I thought you’d explain, like you always do. Even if you can’t, mom, I think I know now. I couldn’t bear to look again alone, or look too close. But with you here I saw it.” This time better than ever. Let’s…

Thoughts echoed around the void and he seemed to fade away, growing vaguely distant, then bouncing back quietly.

“Wait, don’t go without me.” She pleaded.

“I’m not.” He reassured. “See?” It’s here, the moment where you make a— Nothing.

“See what? Where?”

“Oh, you weren’t there for that one, sorry. I found something.” I made a decision and— Nothing.

He was gone for a moment. It's only been a moment. It’s only been a moment. It’s only been a moment.

“There, see what I’m doing?” I don't choose, I just see. Before all the possible futures collapse into one when we decide, we are. It’s the context of all life. It's what living things do. Come with me.

“No. I don’t see.” Frustration. “You’re not doing anything.” Disbelief.

"I am." His voice crashed through the void with a deep, rumbling, monotheistic resonance. All at once the vital threads became one, bound together inseparably. Yet each thread remained distinct, pulsing with their own frequency in harmony with each other, their ends pulled endlessly apart but also sewn together. Their opposition dissolved whilst place and time and sense did.

Sarah watched, bewildered, as reality ran away and something else gave chase. The breakthrough broke through her. She heard a song and with each note fell further enchanted, with each note fell further mad. All the worlds sat before her humbly, all in right alignment. Every branch, every beach, the shallows and the deep, a myriad of lives lived in one accord, cast up like motes of dust in a magic air and polarized along the axis of a single burning beam of blinding light which stretched in no direction to eternity and back. There were no things, yet all things were. No places, but everywhere. No moments, but forever. Nothing changed, nothing moved. It simply was, and was complete, and contained all change.

She looked upon her life. It had all felt so real when it happened. But the light illuminated this too: such was the nature of the illusion of ‘when’. With your consciousness compressed into that simplistic linear progression everything bore new weight. It was through ignorance which fear and dread and hope and excitement were crafted. What a rush. Now she could be, now she was, both the one that lived in ignorance and the one with the total peace of knowledge.

But something intruded. A single bizarre branch of a lightning’s strike which went the wrong way, against the grain of wisdom, and carved its own path through her to the core, setting her ablaze. All at once her new knowledge dispelled itself, and a beast’s voice roared saying “If anything were possible at all, it’d be possible to know yourself.”

She didn’t.

****

“Ah, the mind of a child.” Herbert mused, loudly. “Don’t worry, this happens all the time. Kids are just too imaginative, you really shouldn’t let them use The Loom. If you do, whatever you do, don’t follow them in. Adult minds can’t handle the things they create.” His hands had dug into the machine already and it only took a moment for him to free both of the prone bodies within from their tethers.

They gasped instinctively as the forces of the world began to lie to them again. Breath, wake, feel. Be. They were assaulted by a cacophony of yearnings. Tensions along the bone, itches on the skin, empty pressure in the ears, the taste of blood from bitten tongues, the scent of sweat mingled with piss and perfume, and tears of shock angrily yelling their way down unnecessarily sensitive ruddy cheeks.

Herbert heard their gasps and smiled. “There we go. See?" He noted that neither were catatonic. "They’ll clean up just fine. It’s no big deal, just remember to tip your IT guy.” He winked at Sarah's husband, who watched with an unamused exasperation, shaking his head.

Just as Sarah was regaining her sense and carefully compartmentalizing the whole experience as an acid trip, Jaxom’s voice cut the air. "Mom, why’d you make this again?" He was shaky now, nervous and pained. That mature monotone certainty had been instantly dissolved upon his re-entry into the screaming confines of an eight year old body. She rubbed her temples tightly, even the relief of hearing him finally speak aloud again wasn’t enough to remedy her disillusion. Still, she managed a response. “I didn’t make this, honey, we’re out of that god-awful place, this is real life.” Right? You can’t hear this, right? She studied him pointedly. He made no reaction, only wept.

She tried to comfort him awhile, but his tears wouldn’t dry. “I have to help my man.” He cried. As they sat up, he finally calmed enough to look up into her galactic eyes once again. But he was looking straight through her.

“No matter. I can fix things. I still see the pattern."