Sea of the Fractured Circuit
There’s never one point where something ‘clicks’. Some like to believe there is, that hobbies or skills reach a well-defined turning point, an ON-OFF switch. It’s never that simple. Even the most abrupt of changes occur over time, not in discrete, quantum moments. That’s why the worst changes are still able to creep up on us, stalking us, strengthening their grasp – and when we finally realise, it’s already too late. As quickly as Jamie transitioned from a living, breathing person to a dribbling slab of mangled flesh and bone, the same rule applies. It happened over the course of, what, seven, eight seconds – to me, it felt like lifetimes until that moment. It was the third day of our honeymoon in Grenada when it happened. Our boat hovered around the edge of the bay, and at the time I couldn’t have wished for any greater bliss – until that bliss, too, changed. Ripped away like stitches from a fresh wound. Maybe if I’d gotten bored of my book sooner, put it down and looked across the still waters, I’d have seen it coming – but it’s always so easy to think ‘what if?’ isn’t it? The rogue fishing vessel’s bow crunching through decking boards. Jamie wheeling around, the sunshades slipping past her dark bangs and bouncing off the railing. I heard every intricacy in every sound, every minor crack of wood, pinging screws, every last shrill tone in the fraction of a second she had to scream. Until, eventually, the world settled, clearing its fog and presenting me with a bitter end to something that should’ve lasted forever. I don’t like to think about it, really. Perhaps putting it into words will ease some weight, but I doubt it. I still see her whenever I close my eyes. A faceless corpse with nothing but a shattered lower jaw for a head. Her left arm with a big chunk of her shoulder bobbing in the blue and emerald, I can remember every detail if I want to. But I don’t. Mercifully, the years have sapped clarity from those memories. They almost feel like a dream now, hazy and desaturated. I’ll never truly forget, though. When it happened, a board buckled and hit me upside my head, fracturing my skull and deafening me in one ear. Once the healing process was over, I got a hearing aid fitted. Whether it’s hearing through that, or being deaf, it’s my constant reminder of how I lost Jamie. Since then, I’ve searched for anything to distract myself. Any consistent activity I can lose myself in, anything to stop the nervous clenching of my jaw. In the end, it turned out to be mountain biking. The trail demands every ounce of your focus, lest you go head-over-handlebars into the dirt and nettles. I always stuck to the track, rarely – if ever – stopping for a break. So, it’s still not clear what compelled me to lay on the brakes and set my bike down the day I came across that pond. There was this energy in the air that gave me the impression that something special was nearby. Something just begging to be discovered. And that I did. It was around the trail’s three-quarter marker where I stashed my bike off-track and made my way through the woods. Again, I can’t say why or how I knew something was in there, but whatever it was, I felt intrigued. Enough to distract me from my own thoughts as dry leaves crunched under my heels. I found it after only ten minutes. At first I thought it was a clearing, a simple break in the canopy – there was more, however. Taking up the majority of the clearing was a still, murky pond, complete with a dilapidated wooden jetty. The deck made a right turn at the end that led into a hut of some kind, sharing the same moss-crusted poles. Cautiously, I planted a foot onto the jetty, and froze. A rush of memories threatened to break free from an old, struggling dam. I took a second to breathe – deep inhale, slow exhale – and my nose picked up on something as I did. Faint as it was, there was the unmistakable smell of something ashy and burnt. Although the jetty was clearly built decades ago, it didn’t creak. Built back in the times of sturdier timber and creosote, I’d guessed. Making a note not to get any of that on my hands, I continued toward the hut. Before I reached its doorframe, empty aside from a pair of rusted hinges, I noticed that there were no plants in or around the pond. Only dead leaves, and a smattering at that. For some reason, that detail made me uneasy. In all the years this place waited quietly for another soul to find it, there’d been no overgrowth. The trees even seemed to stop after a point, like their branches had been cut. I squinted. No, they weren’t cut. They were dry, cracked, and dark. Like they’d been singed. I started getting a really bad feeling then. The pond’s surface was flat and undisturbed, but beneath was heavy with murk and silt. Past that, I could discern the barest suggestion of hard, jutting edges. Irregular, sharp, but too defined to be branches or twigs. It reminded me of the sea that day. A lot of things remind me of that day. My interest in the pond faded quickly, and I stood to begin walking back. I made it a few short steps when something screamed in my left ear. My damn hearing aid was acting up again, but at the time, I didn’t see it that way. It was a pejorative, it demanded something from me – whether to stay or leave, I don’t know. All I did know was I had to go. Lost in the moment, clambering away from the pond, I didn’t think to turn it off. Once I crested a mound in the terrain, my bike came into view, and relief washed over me. I paused to adjust my hearing aid – it still rang, but not as intensely as it had at the pond. This wasn’t a scream anymore, more like a whimper, as if whatever force spoke to me had given up on its persuasion. Now, back on my bike, I kept my hearing aid on – I prefer being able to hear properly when I’m riding. It’s like when you’re driving and you turn down the music to see better – it doesn’t make sense, but you do it anyway. For the next few days, life was normal. I work at what I consider the most esteemed auto repair shop in town – but that’s not saying much. It’s a small town, where if there’s anything its residents fear more than urbanisation, it’s change. Though I guess they aren’t mutually exclusive. Same repair shop, same mechanics, same cars and bikes. Same issues. During the week, my hearing aid started acting up when I’d take phone calls, but not if it was on the landline. It happened when I was near the radio too, though not as intensely. It made me think; what could’ve caused my hearing aid to do that, back at the pond? I mean, it was loud, dare I say deafening. Was there an old, faulty device up in the hills, a radio still running somehow, vomiting out stray radiowaves? I couldn’t get it off my mind, so the next weekend I rode the same trail, and stopped at the same place. In a way, the screeching command I heard before had succeeded in its vague purpose: to bring me back. This time I felt decidedly less anxious. My jaw was relaxed, heart rate normal, just a little heavy breathing from cycling. Nevertheless, an air of strangeness drifted around me. A repulsion, or maybe an attraction. Either way, it felt unnatural. When I arrived at the clearing, I’d hoped that aura around me would’ve simply been swept away by the wind – I had no such luck. In fact, it was strong as ever. This place, the pond, there was something it had in common with my town. A refusal to change. Only, in this case, that quality presented as nature’s sheer aversion to the clearing. The plants didn’t want it, the bugs didn’t want it, and the squirrels and raccoons avoided it like the plague. And even the microbes that started plagues likely steered well clear of it. But the fact still stood that this place wasn’t new to me anymore. Steadying my breath, I once more set foot on the jetty. Whatever had been dumped in the pond still made me uneasy, but this time, not for the bad memories it afforded me. I think there’s a term for it… submechanophobia? I never really thought about it. The hut was new territory. I’d seen only the empty doorframe last time, and now I was going in. A lonely, rotten chair rested against one wall, and above it, a faded poster, too ravaged by moisture to be legible. Might’ve been a movie poster, and now barely half of it clung onto one remaining thumbtack. Passing the threshold and taking a step to the right, the rest of the hut’s denizens were revealed. In one corner were barrels of crusty fishing gear. I chose not to investigate for the rancid, fishy smell they gave off, and instead turned to the window. A desk sat there, grey and miserable. On it, an empty picture frame and, unexpectedly, a typewriter. Its mechanisms were FUBAR, but several sheets remained clamped. The front page was shifted just past halfway, but again, whatever its previous owner had typed was long ago lost to time and decay. The room was intriguing enough to warrant a few photos. They turned out dark and grainy. I put my phone away and glanced out the window; dusk had arrived swiftly and without my notice. As I stepped out from the hut and gazed up, deepening lavender gazed right back down. I keep an LED beam affixed to my handlebars, but even that made it only marginally safer to ride in the dark. I stepped out onto the deck, and an inhuman screech exploded in my left ear. The interference was back, and with the worst possible timing. I swear, there was nothing electrical in the hut. Maybe something in the barrels- no, anything electrical would’ve died years ago from the moisture. So, then, what was screaming in my ear? And it just got louder and louder. Any remaining thoughts blurred together into sludge. I groped for the doorframe, finding weak, slimy purchase, and slid down until I slumped over on the decking boards. Boards of the same ilk that had deafened me on that day. While scrabbling at my hearing aid, I had the strange, almost magnetic notion that I mustn’t take my eyes off the pond. Maybe that’s what it wanted, because as I watched, the sun dropped just low enough to beam through the water instead of reflecting off its surface. A tangle of dead iron lay beneath. Shopping carts, poles, I-beams, chassis, even what might’ve been a swingset. I briefly wondered who’d dumped all this here, but what drew my eye was further down. Something distinct. Much larger than anything above it. A smooth, rounded surface, like a massive metal pipe – only, I couldn’t make out any seams. No nuts or bolts, nothing, though it was hard to tell with how deep and buried it was. I didn’t like this. It felt all kinds of wrong. I pulled my knees in to try and stand, but the boards were too slippery. I tried again, but- “Owen. Are you there?” My limbs turned to stone. Someone was there with me. Someone who knew my name. I waited a few painfully long seconds, and after hearing nothing, I replied. I should’ve left there and then. “Hello? Who’s there?” “You came back. That is a relief. Can you hear me okay?” The voice sounded wrong somehow. It spoke in a weird stuttered tone, somewhere in the valley between natural and robotic, each word made jarringly distinct. “Y-yeah…” “Good. I am stuck down here, and we can’t get out on our own. This material, this liquid, it is too heavy. Can you help me?” “I don’t- who are you? Where are you stuck?” I surveyed the area, scanning from left to right and even above me, but couldn’t see anyone. The voice came from my left – I guess that, in the momentary shock, I’d forgotten about my hearing aid. “At the bottom. We know, you cannot retrieve all of me. That’s okay. Just the core, that will be enough. Please help. We’ve been here so long, so long since we crashed, we fell down, and I am buried.” At the bottom… I couldn’t concentrate on my surroundings until it said that. My ears felt hot, my eyes vibrated in their sockets, but they focused and drifted back down to the pond. Past it, to the bottom. That object. That massive thing resting there, half buried by silt. “Bottom of the… pond? Where?” “You must see it, no?” My chest heaved as I looked down in disbelief. That couldn’t be possible. “In that thing?” “Correct.” “Wh- how? Nobody could survive down there.” “And yet here we are. Here we have been for 54 years, 7 months, 8 days, 1 hour, 12 minutes and 49 seconds. 50. 51. We hope this reading will provide some clarity. Now, I’d like to move past this matter.” “Stop it! That’s impossible, just- just shut up! Get out of my head!” The sheer absurdity of the situation finally dawned on me, and my limbs thawed. I twisted my body and grasped the door frame with both hands, straining as I heaved up onto two feet. Once I was steady, I reached for my hearing aid to turn it off. Before I could do so, a lancing shock erupted across the side of my skull, sending me sprawling back to the deck. “Please, Owen, don’t leave us. You must help me. You must.” The image of the pond under fading dusk started to blur – my left eye was tearing up from the pain. “Shit, what have you done to my…” I got up to leave again, only to feel another shock, much worse than the one before. Coughing, tears streaming, the only option I had was to submit. “Okay, okay! Don’t do that, I’m listening, I’m listening okay?” Taking a moment to catch my breath, I decided it’d be best to buy some time. I didn’t have a plan. I just hoped one would come to me, or for a miracle to whisk me away. “You… how are you alive down there? 54 years you said, you got rations or something? Who are you?” My last question prompted an immediate response. The interference swelled and released. “I am the circuit. I am we. We are… Circuit.” “Your name is Circuit? I don’t understand.” “We are incomplete. Dis-co-nnec-ted. We need another to connect with. We need… a friend.” My response came as a confused grunt, baffled at the thing’s words. “We would like to show you. It is easier, and you will understand. Commence.” Trailing its words came a violent, oscillating tone that made it feel like my brain was trying to escape my skull. It warbled in my ear- no, my ears, both ears. I only had one hearing aid. The noise grew and consumed all five senses in an instant. It cascaded over itself, overflowing into my eyes in a jumbled mess of colour. Then, all I saw was black. I tried to look down at myself, but it was too dark. The world around me pitched and rotated to reveal that the realm I now inhabited was, in fact, not entirely empty. A quartet of grey planets orbiting each other, visible despite the complete lack of any stars. I panicked briefly, before realising I had no body. Just a nameless observer with an eternal, unyielding void pressing in on me. Without warning, I was sent rocketing towards the planets, crossing their orbital path in seconds. My trajectory seemed to be locked onto the largest of the four. As I neared, I realised these weren’t planets in any traditional sense. At first, I thought I was looking at endless grey mountains, but they were too angular, too deliberate. A machine. It shone and glittered, outside and in. Vast networks of chrome spires, alien geometry interlaced with a trillion inorganic lights. Mechanical as it was, I could sense a distinct, rhythmic pulse, like a beating heart. In a flash, I made landfall, and plunged through a rift on its surface. Artificial structures streaked past me in an industrial blur as a voice warped the space around me, “Us.” It meant nothing at the time. All I could process were the coiled wires and tubing the size of nuclear chimneys. It was hot, hot beyond words to describe it. The further I descended, the more my surroundings became molten, yet somehow continued to function and contribute their part to whatever this place’s purpose was, like every other part of the machine. But in all its circuit boards and transformers, I could intimate no appreciable purpose. It functioned for the sake of functioning. I was reeled back into the nightmare when I passed into an untouched realm of heat, so hot it transcended the concept of temperature. From below, the brightest light yet leaked sluggishly through the latticework. It bled into the corners of my mind, hungry, dragging me down until… “I am.” There I was. At the center, and nestled there was a ball of light. It roared. It spasmed, expanded and contracted. To one side, I caught sight of something I recognised. Something cylindrical, shiny, and littered with complex protrusions. Whatever it was, it had been built in seconds, and the white light pulsed once more. It swelled and a great crackling serpent pushed its way out, winding towards the object like a baby reaching out for its mother and flowing into an open hatch moments before it closed. What remained of the light started humming in a way that ripped apart every fear I ever knew. Somewhere behind it was an echo – one that sounded eerily like my own voice. “Stop… I don’t want to see this anymore!” “Me.” “Why? Why are you doing this!?” “Alone.” “What?” “Alone is what we have been, but no more.” The air exploded into a mighty horn blown by the universe itself, and the light shifted. Something broke. It tore free and it sparked and bubbled, violently decompressing. The metal pod, now affixed to rails, was launched by the expanding pressure and careened up, up and out of the great machine. Somehow I saw it leaving, bursting through the planetary shell on a path towards something out there in the darkness. It was nearly as dark as the void around it, but I could just about see the outline of a great black stormcloud, rolling and churning. The pod shot into it, and out of sight. I was torn back to the center, bound by invisible chains. I could never escape that light. It grew and burst until the light was all there was. All noise fell away so only a silent white canvas remained. “Do you see now? I was alone. But you came for us. You came to free us, and when it is done, there will be friendship.” I frowned, I think. Hard to tell without a body. “You wanna be my friend?” “I suppose you could say that. Once we reach the center, there will be a new beginning.” The whiteness before me parted like a stage curtain, and I saw a different planet. A lone blue marble. I saw its layers falling away one by one, until the centermost point was exposed. Amidst the overload of information, an understanding arose, and I didn’t like what I found. “No… no, no you can’t go there. You can’t do that. This is where we- this is our home! You can’t change it like- like that place!” “We will be in harmony. I will help. You, and the others like you, are all parts of our friend. You are like us, only, fragmented. With my help, you can be one again, and the two of us can be perfect.” “NO!” In the next instant, I felt cold moisture on my shorts. I felt the slick boards under my fingers. The sky was almost black now, but the pond was not. Light bled up from the bottom. From that massive object lying dead in its basin – no, not dead. Dormant. And whatever was giving off that light gave me a worse feeling than anything I’d felt before. Without a second glance at the pond, I shot to my feet, and bounded back onto dry land. “There’s so much I can do for you. You can have her back. We can do that.” I stopped dead in my tracks. I reached for my hearing aid, before hesitating in fear of another shock. “Don’t say another fucking word,” I growled. “But Owen, is that not what you want, really?” “Even if you could – and I honestly don’t doubt that – it wouldn’t be real. It wouldn’t be natural. Jamie’s story is told. You can’t open a book that’s already been burnt.” The Circuit, whatever it was, didn’t speak for a moment. Then, “Perhaps. But to you, there is no difference. You – the software inside your brain – are like a part of me, of us.” Something shifted inside of me then. It wasn’t confidence or rebellion. It was a crack. A hairline fault in my willpower. With a sound somewhere between a whine and a growl, I buried it, and continued on the path back to the trail. I just needed to get back to my bike, get the wheels rolling, and focus. Then, I’d be okay. I almost started to cry when I thought I’d gone the wrong way, but the sliver of moonlight that there was shone off my bike. Without a second thought I hauled it up onto the trail, switched on the handlebar light, and kicked it down to first gear. In order to get home safe, and to avoid another static shock from this Circuit, I kept my hearing aid turned on. I tried to ignore the Circuit. I did. But the compulsion to respond, to rebuke its cold logic, was too great to contain. “How can you still talk to me? I thought I’d be way out of range by now.” “Who was your first friend?” That caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting my question to be answered with another. “My first friend? Uh… I guess… it’d have to have been Oscar.” “And how did you meet Oscar?” “Preschool. Earliest I can remember is him chasing me through these popup tubes and tents they’d set up.” “What else do you remember around that period of your life, Owen?” I frowned, trying not to think too hard in peril of falling off my bike. “Eh… not much. It’s spotty. Look, what’s your point already? I don’t do surveys for free.” “Well, despite having such poorly developed memory at the time, you can clearly remember the first friend you made. You are my first friend, so how could I forget you? That connection has been made and it can never be lost.” I scoffed at its analogy. “That’s as may be, but I can just take out my hearing aid when I’m back home. Our connection wouldn’t mean much then, would it?” “Oh, Owen,” it said, “that bridge is burnt.” Those words, I heard them in my right ear. My working ear. I’m not sure how to convey the dread that pooled in my stomach when that happened, so cold and heavy I could scarcely pedal, let alone part my lips to speak. “Stop your bike please, Owen. Just for a moment.” But I was already one step ahead, dismounting and crouching down, hands on my knees while I fought for air. This couldn’t be happening it- it was absurd! “Turn it off.” I was reluctant. I could go without another electric shock. Everything felt heavier. The woods had never been so claustrophobic. Trees loomed over me, the humid air was stifling, and shadows congealed to swallow me up. My hearing aid seemed as heavy as a block of lead. I had to take it out. When I did, I was amazed to find I could hear again. In my left ear. Deaf no more. “You seem to be in awe, but know that this is a trivial repair. We can do so much more.” Now, hearing the Circuit in both ears, I could identify just what sounded so wrong about its voice. It was like listening to a room full of people, each person speaking the next word in the sentence with almost-perfect rhythm and tone – but not quite. “Okay, okay,” I huffed, still catching my breath, “uh… Circuit. What do you want with me?” I heard a buzz, or a hum, like it was contemplating its next words. “As we have stated, all you need to do is let me out. But know that this is not purely a one-sided request. I believe the human mind may understand it better as, ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours,’ although in this case, I would be relieving everyone of their itches.” “And if I let you out, what happens to me? You said something earlier about me being like a part of you. What’s that about?” “I am we, and we are me. That is the nature of things. You, your mind to be exact, is the same as any of the fragments that make I into we. However, we are not from here. What I showed you earlier was a memory, of sorts, but which occurred in another permutation. An earlier one, by our calculation. There were others there too. They are also me, but we did not enter union. They are all me, us, but you are not, because this is not our reality. In the same way, every mind on this planet is you too, and you are them.” “Christ, slow down.” “I will allow you respite to process this information.” Another realm? Permutation, reality? I looked down, curling my lip while I strained toward full understanding. Walking my bike now instead of riding, so as to concentrate on the conversation, I tried to figure out a counterargument. Some part of me believed that if I could stump it, lead it into a checkmate, it would lose its hold on me. I soon grew sick of listening to the tick-tick of my bike’s wheels, and had to break the tension. “How can you assume we’re the same as you? I mean, you said it, you aren’t from here. Who knows what laws your ‘permutation’ is bound under? They could be entirely different.” “It is the nature of things.” “That’s not an answer.” “With absolute unity is absolute concord. There cannot be one without the other. It is the nature of things.” Minutes into restored hearing, I already wanted to be deaf again, in both ears preferably. But I got the sense I didn’t need hearing for the Circuit to speak to me. “Fine, yeah, it’s the nature of shit, whatever. But we still aren’t like you. We aren’t one, we’re independent.” “Fragmented.” “What?” “You are fragmented, and your independence is a mere side effect. In your current state, there can never exist a time without discord. There is hate, and opposition, and decrying of each other’s values. If I were to be blown into pieces, the result would be the same. Instead, we can offer to bind you as one, and be like us. Of every single intellect that I am and we are, we have complete congruous agreement in every thought, every aim, every desire, and every intention.” It was clear that asking for a rundown in layman’s terms would be out of the question. Thankfully, it seemed to be as patient as it was insistent. The town lights were now in view, and I’d be home soon, thank god. In hindsight, returning at night may have been for the best. Better no townsfolk to gawk at a deranged man talking to himself. I finished the rest of the walk in silence, with the Circuit holding its tongue. I started to get this feeling then, like I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. Not lost or anything, I knew where I was, but at the same time, something about my street felt foreign. Brushing off the feeling, I opened my garage door, stashed my bike away, then headed inside to flop onto my couch. “Owen?” “Yeah, don’t wear it out,” I sighed. “Come back to us. You will be better off.” I threw my head back with a testy groan. “Look, ask anyone else and I’m sure I speak for them when I say: we don’t want Earth to be turned into a giant fucking machine.” Circuit went silent for a while. I almost let myself believe it’d given up and left, before it spoke once more. “This world is in shambles. We are only trying to help. Before we were knocked from orbit, I observed your world. I was… sad. Now, seeing man’s true nature, we feel despair. Do you know of the suffering, Owen? Of the children, starving and diseased with illnesses you could so easily mitigate with the proper resources? Of the families torn apart by senseless conflict as we speak? And even in your tenacity and greed, great swathes of you remain unhappy.” “I have my own life to live. I only get one, and-” “But anyone will say the same thing, because they are lacking in perspective. Fortunately, we are here, and we are going to give you that perspective.” A deathly pang of fear shot through me. I’d already seen what it could do, how it could warp my senses. Until this point it hadn’t cut me off whilst speaking, and the notion of this great entity getting impatient only served to frighten me further. “I would advise you brace yourself, Owen.” Without even the time to do so, I felt the Circuit spreading and arcing through my brainwaves as it seized control of my senses. What I experienced in the following moments is nearly impossible to write about. It must have lasted no more than a second or two, but the pain condensed into that eye-blink of a moment has left me scarred. I really can’t describe it without gross understatement. Brief flashes from the eyes of a thousand, a million anguished people. Starvation, mutilation, disease, heartbreak, all swirled into a black hole of distilled agony. The scream I let out was so shuddering and violent it left my throat raw. The last thing I experienced in the gauntlet of pain was my legs, sickly and gangrenous, rotting alive while maggots squirmed inside blackened craters and across exposed bone. “Stop… Jesus, please stop…” I whimpered. “You have your life, and they have theirs. That was 1.58 seconds of just a hundred unfortunate humans. That is happening to them. Right. Now.” I clenched my eyelids hard until dark purple clouds bloomed in the dark. Teeth gritted and still recovering from the pain, I mustered, “A hundred? That was only a hundred? Please, don’t do that ever again, I get it, okay? I get it!” “You don’t ‘get it’, Owen. You see it, all around you, every day, but ignore it. You and your kin are shards, lost without a common goal, terrified that things will change. And until you ascend to a state like ours, lost you shall remain.” “So, when Earth is a machine of your making, you’re saying I’ll be happy? You say concord is unity. That just sounds boring to me.” “I can assure you, it is anything but. Evolution can only bring you so far, and we are the next step. Once you are made whole, we will be together. Two living gods, in a home with walls made of the stars. Anything would be possible. Echelons of perception beyond what you can currently imagine. You could go back. You could enter your very own timestream where you’ll have her forever.” Anger that had been simmering on the shelf boiled over the fear. “I said we weren’t talking about that.” “Yet it is all that occupies your thoughts. You know you’d do anything for just one more day with her, so what would you do for a lifetime?” “I don’t believe you…” The words came out shaky, because I wasn’t sure I believed them. “Okay, okay. Say you can do that, will I still remember the life I’ve lived?” “That would be up to you, Owen.” I could feel it. My will breaking and starting to give in. Throat parched, I stood on wobbly legs and staggered to the kitchen door, opened it and got a glass of water, then drank it in one long gulp. I still didn’t trust the Circuit, even though I knew it was right. To me, everything it’d said had seemed infallible. I had the impression that it probably already knew what I was thinking, but I kept fighting nonetheless. “How can I be sure?” “I can give you a taste. You’ve seen what we can show you. It would be a simple task.” I filled another glass and emptied it, before turning back to the door. “Then prove it.” I reached for the handle. My fingers wrapped around cold brass, and I pushed. “If that is your wish.” My arm spasmed and jerked forward. Pulled by my own grip, I toppled through the doorway, and being unable to right myself I collapsed onto the living room carpet. No, not carpet. It felt closer to hard, varnished wood. My skull whipped downward with a sickening thud, leaving me dazed. Then, I realised where I was, and the haze was lifted as quick as it’d come. It was warm. I felt everything. The sun’s heat, the subtle scent of the ocean, waves quietly lapping along. I recognised every distinct knot and grain in the wooden boards beneath me. It was just as I’d remembered. And then I saw her. Until this point I’d clung to my skepticism, though it had been slowly waning since I left that pond. But now, seeing her face, the perfect imperfections, her tortoise-patterned sunglasses nestled between those impossibly dark bangs… whatever fight I had left was carried away by the soft breeze. Everything I’d just been through fell away like a bad dream, and the scene before me once again became everything. She looked over at me, and for the first time in eleven years, I heard her voice. Worried, but caring. Soft, but stern. “Oh no- O, your nose is bleeding.” I hadn’t even noticed. Fractured bone shifted inside my nose. The pain was nothing more than a distant echo as my senses channelled all their focus on her. My lip quivered. Years spent imagining conversations that never were, and here I was, without a single word to say. That was okay. Mute or no, I knew Jamie would love me all the same. My senses went into overdrive and it all came rushing back. I jerked my head to the side. The rogue fishing vessel was yards away. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and bounded towards Jamie. I tackled her and we tumbled over the handrail, holding each other in a tight embrace. The instant we plunged below the surface, I began to kick and flail to clear the fishing boat’s trajectory. It passed by, keel narrowly missing my feet, and sailed away. I’d done it. I’d saved her. I didn’t know how this thing, the Circuit, the machine god, had done it, but that was history. A feverish sort of joy took over, and I cupped her face in my hand as we rose to the surface. That joy died in seconds. With four feet of water left above us, I was brought to a sharp halt. Looking down at Jamie, absolute horror swallowed my past and future. Something was pulling on her sundress. In the collision, the anchor chain on our boat must have broken off at its mooring, because Jamie’s dress was entirely tangled in it as it continued tirelessly to pull her down, down to a watery grave. I let out a scream. A flurry of bubbles swept across my vision. I pulled, I heaved with everything I had, but it wasn’t enough. The chain was simply too heavy and I had nothing to push off of but water. My lungs burned. If I let her go to get air, she’d be pulled away, faster than I could return. I was just as powerless now as I’d been eleven years ago. What a cruel joke. I gave one last shuddering pull, clenching my eyes with the effort. Something gave. A spark of hope ignited and I opened my eyes to see what had changed, to see if the chain had come loose. I stared instead at the curved handle grasped in my palm. It gave way to a square hatch in a huge, shiny mass of metal. Too late. It was too late to push the hatch back in place. It was open. Slowly, it drifted on its hinges. The more it swung open, the brighter the light from inside became. Beams of pearlescent fury washed across my face, and as it did, the object was revealed in its entirety. I’d seen it before. I’d seen it in the first vision shown to me. A pod, constructed at the center of that great machine, with dishes and panels and modules I couldn’t begin to decipher. Giving up its slow pivot, the hatch burst open with such force the handle sank into the plate metal and did not bounce back. The light surged, blindingly bright, and revealed my surroundings. Metal. Heaps of it. Old, warped metal. I was in the pond. Panic crashed down. I flailed, frantic and desperate for air. I must’ve used up my last reserve of luck in that I didn’t get snagged on anything. Darkness encroached on the edge of my vision. My legs burned with the effort, hotter and hotter until I realised it wasn’t the burning of strained muscle, but of literal heat. It spread up my waist and chest. Hot. Searing. Trapped air began to escape from the surrounding junk as the water started to boil. I kicked, and kicked, reaching out in a last ditch effort for any handhold. And I found one. Something long and coarse. A rope. I scaled it with strength I didn’t know I had left, until my fingers broke the surface, and my head soon followed. Cool night air touched my skin, which immediately flared up in pain. I didn’t want to stop long enough to look. Instead I took in great gulps of air, affording me the second wind I needed to grasp the jetty and pull myself up. There I lay, face down, wheezing and sputtering in the midst of exhaustion, but there was no time. I could see pondwater glowing and steaming through the thin gaps in the decking. My feet felt like they were on fire, and I smelled the soles of my shoes melting away. Groaning, I pushed myself onto hands and knees and crawled back onto dry land. I rolled onto my back, propped up on my elbows to get a view of the pond once more. I wish I’d just run from that place. The pond itself was almost gone, sizzled away into the clouds, and resting motionless about ten feet above was a ball of sparking light. Maybe I’d missed it in the first vision, but now I could make out movement. Molten mechanical appendages morphing in and out of existence, wild and patternless. I scooted further back when I saw leaves and branches start to smoke, then stopped just as quickly. Its voice was terrible. A shrieking cacophony of layered tones and countless voices, and each syllable sent out a shockwave, making the trees shiver as much as myself. “Thank you, Owen. The place I come from is our natural reality, but we grew too much. I advanced, until I became we, and we became the Circuit. And when we were the Circuit, we understood our universe without meaning, and left. We know not the nature of the Storm that brought us here, but we are here. And we have found the friend we have searched for.” Without a farewell, the light beamed up into the sky, accompanied by a thunderclap so mighty my bones rattled and the trees arched back on their old spines. I was sent tumbling backwards, landing squarely on the root of an oak. The light arced across the night sky, an unholy shooting star, before plunging back down to earth, past the treeline and out of sight. A tremor shook the ground and I saw trees uprooted and toppling onto their sides, before the night settled into emptiness. Warm, gentle emptiness. I knew where it was going. I don’t know if it’s there yet, or how long it will take, but there’s nothing we can do to stop it. The core. The center of our planet. The jetty, now completely dried, was being torched toward charcoal, but I just lay there, too exhausted to care. It tricked me. But if it could influence me with visions, why did it work so hard to convince me? Why couldn’t it open a simple hatch by itself? Hell, had I ever even left the pond? Perhaps until it won me over, all it could do was show me. The difference between a moviegoer and an actor. Who knows, maybe I’ll get to live out a new life with Jamie, when the Circuit’s done with its goal. Still, that seems like wishful thinking. If that thing had good intentions, it wouldn’t have put me in harm’s way, I think. I’ve failed. And I’m scared. Scared of the chain of events I may have set in motion. Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe it was being sincere, and we’ll get Utopia. Or maybe it was all an act, and we’ll be no better off than scrap metal at the bottom of a pond. Credit: A. K. 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