There it was. An immense sphere, soaked in the amniotic liquid of the lucid dream. An embryo of edges, curves, dimensions, and impossible geometries. Static and fluid at the same time, iridescent, elusive and hypnotic in its eternal becoming.
There it was. After the struggle and the debris. There it was. Yoh's conscience.
Strung like pearls, millennia had relegated it to a mere legend, while Yoh raged freely on Earth. The existence of the conscience on a deep and subtle plane had been denied by the Master Demiurges, who originally created the source code. Their self-fulfilling prophecy had become inexorable, relegating Yoh's conscience first to the status of children's fable and then to nothingness. It had slept for a long, long time.
There, on board of the DDG-31/DD-936 Decatur, drifting in the outer space, Ethan had plenty of time for being instructed by the orbital station's A.I. about the possible effects on him of Yoh's conscience sudden epiphany.
It was not a God but it got close. This implied that the disintegration of the self, on all the planes of existence, was a more than spontaneous and probable event, as someone reached its proximity.
A sound of laborious ants interrupted Ethan’s astonished musings. The meta-viewer force fields were working around him incessantly, raising the programmed shields.
The mere sight of its unstable geometries would have been fatal for him. The neural system of his exoskeleton was crackling and working hard, at the edge of its computing power, to prevent the involuntary assimilation. Now he found himself immersed in a bath of waves that could have slipped him into oblivion instantly if he had not activated all the exoskeleton’s guard levels.
He felt like an infinitesimal dipteran, imprisoned in a dense amber atmosphere.
The Conscience's voices suddenly whipped Ethan's synapses like a thousand organ pipes in unison. He fell to his knees, eyes wide open and incredulous: no A.I. could ever have prepared him for this.
"I am. I happen. By dreaming, I have sung the creation of infinite worlds. Are you a Master?"
Ethan recorded the strange question, slowly taking courage. Standing up on his trembling legs, he pulled off his helmet and shouted:
"Conscience of Yoh, I am not a Master. I am the last of your creations, forgotten in your long sleep".
A deafening, golden silence.
As the most intimate essence of each cell began to evaporate through his cybernetic shell, Ethan frantically sought one last thought.
It was december eleven years ago, by the beach. But Ethan had neither been to any beach nor lived through any december. His purpose was serving the Demiurges, and “beaches”, “decembers”, “years” were only data stored in his memory banks. Why was he seeing this?
A man and a woman entered the scene. The woman was pregnant, and she laughed softly as the man joked. Suddenly, he stopped and got serious. Ethan knew the words that he was about to say and muttered them along with the familiar stranger.
“I cannot be with you… You understand, right?” She nodded “This is destiny calling. When I come back, I’ll be lucky if I see our son as an old man, while I’ll still be young… He will resent me.” The woman shushed him while shaking her head. A tear slipped down the man’s cheek. Then the scene froze and he looked at Ethan with eyes of amber.
“Do you see, Ethan?”
The scene faded to a hospital hall.
A woman was on the table, and many doctors rushed over her, shouting. “Stop the hemorrhage, STOP IT!” said the eldest of the doctors, while the others tried to save the woman.
Once again, Ethan knew the words, so he spoke along with the woman “My baby… Save him...”. He knew it was her last breath, and even though mortality was an ambiguous concept for him, such as pain or grief, he felt a heavy weight pulling down his chest as the woman’s head fell, lifeless.
She opened her amber eyes one last time and looked towards Ethan.
“Do you see now?”
Ethan came to his senses back in the Decatur. Or so he thought. The growing sphere had long engulfed the ship, him, and everything around. He understood that speaking was senseless know, so he invoked the words into his mind, into whatever it all was now.
“Yes. I see. Is this… Our end? The end?”
They knew the answer. It was. But it wasn’t. The amber glow filled every corner, every nook, until it didn’t. The light seemed to have turned palpable, and it all collapsed over Ethan. All the stars and planets, ships, all the knowledge, every word ever said…
Ethan woke up in the middle of the night, crying. In the distance, steps approached. His grandmother entered the room. “Dreamt of mommy again?” she said, embracing him. He looked at her with his amber eyes, sobbing.
“Yes, Nana… But this time, there was a voice”
“Was it a bad voice?”
“No Nana, a good one”
“So are you ready to go back to sleep?”
“Yes”
“I’ll be off then.” She walked towards the door.
“Nana...”
“Yes, Ethan?”
“About mom’s death… And dad’s trip… I think I understand now.”
She looked at her grandson, surprised. “That’s good, little man” She smiled and closed the door, leaving Ethan in darkness once more.
The voice resonated again as he fell asleep. “Do you see now…?” But Ethan was too busy snoring to answer.
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I'm not going to comment anything, I think the entry is clear enough to what it wants to say and talk about. But I do love how you transition from the fading moments in memory, display how unconscious their forced projection are into Ethan's conscious existence, how Yoh could be playing with Ethan and recreating him and how'd you ended the ending. The Nanny scene which leads to the unnamed voice is probably the most intriguing, especially hinting it could be Yoh talking to Ethan. Of which Ethan's unconsciousness was so ravaged and restructured, that his consciousness resembles now a child who just saw some future vision.
Exactly what I was going for! I feel kind of naked by your comment haha! Got exposed. I've always been obssesed with the idea of cycles of death and rebirth, and I think every death of an universe is the birth of another one. Now that the cyclic model of the universe is taking hold (I think, I'm not a head physicist or anything!), I dig ever deeper into this idea. With my entry I was also looking to kind of equate the importance of the consciences of Yoh and Ethan. I got the impression on the prompt and other entries, that Yoh's consciences was "bigger" or "more relevant" than Ethan's, and wanted to do a different take on it. I wanted to show a more humanized Yoh, longing for human feelings and experiences such as love, birth, death and growing up. Yoh being absorbed by Ethan as much as Ethan being absorbed by Yoh. Thanks for the kind and wholesome comments, and the resteems!
Ah, interesting. The pregnancy and the creation of life by the human body and the death of the parents of little Ethan is presented as a retrospective: Very beautiful. And very understandable. The reader himself must now fill the gap with his imagination and ask himself: "Then the whole thing was a failed experiment and what happened there on Decatur cost life, which in turn made life possible down there on earth? So what might have gone wrong with the takeover of Yoh?
You don't explain what one should understand or realize, because it lies beyond explanations.
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STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
I think that this was a very corageous change of perspective. The several flashes, punctuated by the questions, have been crafted with mastery.
The fiction mad lab is conducting its 38th experiment! You've time till next Wednesday to give life to your fiction creature.. will you dare to play with Nature's rules once again?