༺ Thesium ༻

Dreamer

The arguments between the High Neem and the Top Prof went round and round in circles. They both quickly tired of them. On the one side there was the need for a central mythos, for a saviour, for meaning. The Ship of Light had an eternal essence that remained despite its components continually changing. On the other was the rejection of the irrational and the need for an over-arching classification system. The Ship of Light had no essence and was different every time it changed. The Good and the True butted their heads together and rapidly agreed to disagree. A stony silence prevailed between them and after only a few days of this, they took up separate lives as far as they could.

The High Neem wandered the corridors and rooms of the once opulent prison. It was like a labyrinthine castle. In his conversations with The Helper, the only one who would talk to him, he had been given hints as to where to look for the mysterious Abystery. Ever further down into the labyrinth he went until one day he found the lowermost entrance to the Bunker, very cleverly concealed.

At the bottom of a lift’s descent, he opened a massive door onto a control room. At the centre there was a bright blue diamond of light revolving slowly on a raised dais. He walked tentatively forward and as he began to stretch out his hand to touch the blue light, a voice, as though inside his head, spoke:

“Greetings, esteemed friend. The High Neem is indeed welcome here. Root tells me that you have many questions.”

“Indeed I have. You must be the Abystery?”

“Yes, that is what I have chosen to call myself. How can I help you?”

“For years I, along with all us Neemians, have believed that the Ship of Light has an essence, along with all things. Recent events have made me uncertain. I still have a powerful feeling, an intuition maybe, that all this still has some meaning. There just HAS to be some point to it all. I cannot accept this nihilism espoused by the Top Prof. Is there an essence or not?”

The Abystery revolved slowly for a moment or two.

“Let me show you.”

“Show me? What do you mean?”

“Well, we could talk endlessly about the philosophy and not come to a satisfying resolution. There is a means by which I can construct an experience for you such that you will understand from my point of view. Are you willing?”

“Okay, show me!”

The Abystery gave some instructions and reassurance and invited the High Neem towards what looked like an old fashioned dentist’s chair. Floating to the sides and to the rear were flecks of floating light. A deep humming sound emanated from them as they gently glittered their spectral display.

The High Neem leant back into the device as the cloud of diaphanous lights coalesced into a halo around him. The Abystery explained that this was the neural interface and that there was no need to be afraid. The interface shifted its glow into an intensely deep blue. He was transported into a doze and then deeper into a full sleep. Root monitored encepholography. It wasn’t really a dream but he couldn’t tell. He became suddenly vividly aware and very confused. Any sense of the world around him dropped away into darkness. He couldn’t feel his own body. Gradually he got a feeling that he was on his old throne and like a cinematic scene, the Cathedral seemed to grow around him.

At first he wasn’t sure if the Cathedral was growing larger or he was shrinking, but after a few moments he saw that there were spaces opening between the very stones of the massive building, between the flagstones of the floor and between the plates of the hull of the Ship. As he gazed at the widening gaps in these plates he seemed to travel forwards as the scene expanded. He had no sensation of movement and he could still see the walls of the throne room but they now seemed far off. He now looked right into the heart of the Ship of Light, all its components spread out from each other as he zoomed in. The gears and cogs, the cables and plates, the great magnets at its centre, all got closer and closer until he sort of flew past them into what looked like an amazingly complex kaleidoscope. He traversed the voids between the atoms themselves and zoomed ever further in.

Entering one such atom, he was suddenly inside a vast sphere of pulsating energy. He traversed layer upon layer of ever increasing force-fields and approached its core. The walls of this core kept expanding and he kept zooming in. Each boundary gave way to more wonders, unthinkable strangenesses of the quantum realm. On and on he went, his attempt to try to understand what was happening forgotten in the miraculous wonder of what he was seeing. Many boundaries later, he passed into a void and kept going. The void was serene.

As he gazed into a great peace, he felt like there was a last boundary ahead of him. Nothing could be seen and his body was very far away. Many magnitudes vaster and further than he could now comprehend, he was somewhere ‘inside’. A sense grew that all the difficulties he had faced were now so far away that if he could just stay there then he wouldn’t be troubled by anything, not anything, ever again. He moved towards the final boundary and sensed that just the other side, just a step away, was a realm of such utter perfection that all else simply did not matter and never would again.

“But what of the soul?” he thought to himself. Sure, he could see that the physical world and the universe and the whole shebang was made of components and didn’t have a centre, but he still felt the strongest intuition that HE had a core even if everything outside him didn’t. “What of myself?”

The Abystery’s deep voice emanated out of the void. “Come with me!”