TLH4 - Ch. 24 - The Curse of Knowledge (Patreon)

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***

He was a machine. He ate. He slept. He carried stones. Dull, mind-numbing work it might be, Poire eagerly climbed the stairs. And though each journey grew a little longer as the Old Man added to the ever-growing spiral staircase, Poire found himself actually looking forward to the work.

Well, not the work.

It was the Seeing Room that kept him moving, and the promise of sight. The Old Man had shown him how to peer into Humanity’s past—everything touched by the Light—and now his imagination was on fire. He hauled the next sack up the steps, dropped off the stones, and chucked the sack over the side of the tower. Then, with barely a word to the Old Man, he sprinted back down the steps, his feet so expert they almost seemed not to touch the steps at all.

Why bother talking, when all his questions could be answered at the source?

He meant to start small. He meant to start with the little questions, like what was life like before the Gates were built, and everyone lived on a few planets? Or how did they build the first Dam?

But as he kneeled before the water, and bowed forward, in the slender slice of time before his face touched the water, a different thought came to mind. When Emorynn spoke to Anu, what did Anu show her?

Instead of the cold splash of water, he felt a shrinking, stretching sensation as reality folded itself into a tunnel. Luminous patterns of stars and shifting galaxies melted together like hot glass. They streaked together, at once sliding toward him, and stretching further away. Shapes glowed, some rising out of darkness, before slipping back under. Some pulled by jagged branches of light that wove intricate lace across a senseless disorientation of too much movement.

Slowly, like bleeding visuals in a simulation that had been left running for far too long, the shapes almost started to make sense. An eye. The curve of a lip. A face appeared in the storms of color.

Emorynn.

She was tens of thousands of miles away, behind the glass of the dam’s observation room, yet he could see she was staring right at him. Her lips were bursting with color, and the corners of her face flickered and flowed out like water, but Poire could hear her perfectly.

“What are you?”

Is she asking me?

He looked down at himself, as if he might find the answer there. Gone were his legs, his strange blurry clothes made from the shredded fibers of the plant-things that grew in the other universe, gone were his arms, and the lighter skin of his palms. He wore a new form. A silhouette of a human, made up of a million flat-edged polygonal chrome. As if his body couldn’t quite resolve in this universe. A slender thread of Light erupted from his chest. A thousand more followed, until his torso was a blistering mass of lightning, too bright to look upon.

The lightning—his lightning—crawled across the vast distance between the two of them. Like tongues, the bolts licked against the dam, but the bolts cracked and splintered against the black metal, and crumbled into nothing. Their sudden absence discomfited him, like teeth that had fallen out of his mouth. Or fingers, severed from his hands.

Poire tried to pull back, to curl his hands to his chest, to pull out of the vision. But her voice stopped him.

“I want to know everything,” she said, her need dripping from every word. “Everything.”

Poire lurched forward. Or perhaps, the universe was pulled back, so that his electric limbs and all his jagged lightning focused for a brief moment on her. Through her eyes, and into the mind.

Her mouth fell open. “Why—” she stammered. “What are you?”

Worried furrows carved the pale skin of her forehead. Her thin eyebrows, almost knitted together, with a look approaching—but not quite—fear. Her lips were parted, as if she was about to say something. The whites of her eyes sparkled with the reflections of the living Scar.

She could see him. Poire was certain.

“Why are you doing this to us?” she asked.

I’m not, he wanted to say. But when he opened his lips to speak, his mouth was full of lightning.

“What do you want from us?” she asked, her wide eyes growing wider. Poire tried to reach for her, and flinched back as he saw—not fear, but true, primal horror in her eyes. “Why?” she said again. And her eyes rolled up into the back of her head.

This time, when Poire was severed from the dream, it felt like a fist made of ice had rammed into his stomach. He came up choking and vomiting water, coughing liquid everywhere until his throat was raw.

***

The windows of the sky flickered and flamed their vivid colors across the rough steps, bathing the landscape (which looked more to Poire like an ocean of mud) in an eerie glow. It was hard to tell, but it seemed the Old Man’s tower had grown, and grown quite a lot, in the few hours he’d been gone. The spiral stairs certainly had, and though Poire tried, he kept losing count of the steps.

When he reached the top, he found the Old Man was still painting more steps up the ever-growing stairs. He didn’t look as Poire approached, but he spoke to him in his gravelly, cracked voice, so much rougher than Poire’s own. “You were gone a while.”

“Sorry. I needed to rest.”

“I thought we were almost there,” he gazed up at the sky and all the strange shapes kaleidoscoping there. “I was going to get you a few days back. But I was wrong. It never seems to grow any closer.”

A few days? Poire wondered. He hadn’t been at the Seeing Room that long, had he? The vision had lasted a few moments, at most. Surely not more than an hour.

The Old Man took one of the fresh stones from Poire, and drew two fingers across its length. Then, he pulled a stalk of celery, crisp and green and perfectly shaped, from the stone and took a huge bite. Poire couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen celery. No, that was a lie. Xiaoyun, his old caretaker. It was her favorite. But I always told her it tasted like dirt.

“Bite?” the Old Man offered him the half-chewed stalk.

“Don’t like celery.”

“You used to think that. Sure that’s still the case?”

It had been a long time. He took the offered plant, and gave it a testing bite. Fresh. Crisp. Not quite sweet. He’d eaten his share before, but they never tasted anything like this. It was like … like tasting home.

The Old Man pulled another green vegetable out of the stone, and the two of them sat on the steps, gazing across the horizon, crunching thoughtfully. “So?” the Old Man asked between mouthfuls, “What did you see?”

“”I saw Emorynn, talking to the Scar.”

“And?”

“It was like she could see through the Scar. Like she was talking to me.”

The Old Man swallowed hard, and stared at Poire.

Poire continued, “She thought I was coming for her. She was afraid of me.”

“All of them are. Emorynn was the first, but they all see the same thing. They see us. Right before everything dies. Wherever we go, destruction follows.”

“But we left. We saved them. Why would they still see that?”

The Old Man pinched Poire’s scratchy shirt between two fingers, “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

“Wait,” Poire frowned. Then, as the thought formed, his stomach sank, “You think one of us goes back? But that would destroy everything.”

The Old Man shrugged.

“But why would we do that? If we died there, it would kill them. It would destroy everything. What reason—”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“The only thing that’s obvious is that I would never go back,” Poire said, though the thought was agonizingly tempting—to return. To live.

“You don’t know that,” the Old Man growled.

“Well, I know myself,” Poire said, “And I know what happens if either one of us goes back there.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“Then tell me anything. Tell me why you think this will work,” He waved the half-chewed talk around angrily. “Tell me why you’re so convinced this is the path forward.”

“You have no idea how many plans I tried. That all of us tried. This is the only way forward.”

“What proof? How am I supposed to believe you? How do I know that you haven’t lost your mind?”

“And what about yours?” the Old Man started shouting over him, “The pools. Always in the pools. We could be finished by now.”

“You were the one who showed me how to use the pools. You told me to use them!”

“To learn, not to live a false life. You’re obsessed. I go months without seeing you, just your body, kneeling over the water. Weeks go by, and you don’t move. It isn’t healthy. Wanting what you want, sustaining yourself on dreams of what you can never have. Listen to me. I know what you want, because we want the same thing. I am trying to save them, to save us. But I am going to miss it.”

“It’s a cycle. What about all the Poires who came before us? Shouldn’t you already know how this ends?”

A bitter smile spread across the Old Man’s lips. He squeezed one of the stones in his hand, crumbling it to dust and letting the wind take it. “The Old Poire… I never found out if he made it. But I’m going to. I’m going up, and I’m going to find out. I will fix this.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“If I start thinking like that, then I’ve already lost. But that’s how we think, isn’t it? You and me. Go and seek answers, then. But,” he grabbed Poire by the arm, his strong fingers almost pulling the younger Poire down, “But, a warning. You won’t find answers down there. Only the past.”

***

In the Seeing Room, a forest of dark columns waited for him, illuminated with slices of the pools’ watery glow. He kneeled down before the closest one, his hands balled into fists, his jaw clenched. I want to know everything. I must. He took a slow, deep breath, trying to block out the Old Man from his mind. He dipped his head into the pool.

He started at the beginning, when humanity reached the first Scar.

First, came a probe, blinking as it screamed past.

Then, came another.

Then, the first ship—huge and hulking—crawled slowly through the stars. The ship cracked and deteriorated long before it reached the Scar, so they sent another, this one lingering much further away. They built stations, still further out, designed to capture the Light.

And then… they began construction of the first Dam. It started with the main disc, made of that familiar black metal, glittering and absorbing all the strange colors of the Scar. Now, there were people living on the Dam, and the Dam expanded. More discs, until its the Dam resembled a geometric bouquet of flat, black flowers. Huge spikes drew the lightning from the Scar, and Towers crackled with excess energy as that first Dam began—not to hold the energy back, but to draw forth.

But this Scar… it was different. Normally, they were docile, magnificent glowing patches in the sky. But here, branches of lightning thrashed violently, clawing and grasping and dying against the Dam’s base. Thousands of erratic beams and angular rays of Light poured out from its eternal depths. Poire had only seen one other Scar act thus: the one over Cyre. And that one had been dangerously fragile.

But this vision only left him with more questions.

So he pulled himself out, and tried again.

He found Earth, long before it was ruined, and he paused as a shift rolled through his mind, forever changing what he thought it meant to be human. There must’ve been millions of people down there. Billions. They literally lit up the globe.

How could there ever have been so many people in the world? On a single world?

The vision sank into a skyline, staggeringly tall. It stretched across the horizon, immense structures marched toward the ocean, towering figures rising lit up every color, brilliant against a dusky sky. Beyond, strings of elevators cut the sky, and thousands of blinking lights danced overhead. Not stars, but vessels that sailed through the air, or orbited in the high atmosphere.

He watched the busy thriving of the city for so long.

Poire resurfaced, and slipped into the pool again, searching for Emorynn.

There was a woman, almost bouncing down a hallway in a clean apartment building. The halls almost reminded Poire of the habitats down in the Conclave. Poire didn’t recognize the woman at first, because he’d only seen her when she was much older, deteriorated and cracked from going through the Mirror.

Sen. She looked so young. Her short hair shone as it bounced, and she clutched a tablet to her chest as she almost ran down the hallway. “Emorynn!” she hammered on one of the doors. “It worked. Emorynn—?”

Unlocked, the door swung open. Inside, Emorynn was bent over a desk in a dark studio apartment, so cluttered Poire couldn’t tell where the walls began. There were lamps everywhere, but most of them had burned out. Boxes and tablets and screens covered every flat surface, wire cords snaked covered the floor, some buried under empty food containers that had been scraped clean, and so many papers lay scattered everywhere she had started taping them up on the windows.

They were covered in engineering designs.

“Emorynn?” Sen said, tentatively.

“Hm?” the prophet-to-be sat up. Blinked a few times as her eyes struggled to adjust to the light pouring in from the hallway.

Sen pursed her lips, as if she wanted to say something about the state of the room. Then, she shook her head. “I built it, exactly the way you said. I tested it on a grain of rice. Then, an apple. It even worked on the rats. All of them.” Sen bounced on her heels, excitedly awaiting Emorynn’s reply.

“Oh.”

Unabashed, she kept trying. “I set up a test with the other research lab. The distance didn’t matter—we moved one of them across the continent. In a blink. It drained all the Light, but there’s more, isn’t there. Emorynn, how did you do it? How did you figure out all of this—”

Only then, did Sen see the designs littering the room. Thousands of them, some scribbled with oddly specific geometric patterns, engineering diagrams with precisely-drawn parts, and crowded with mathematical symbols. But not all of the symbols belonged to any language Poire knew. They felt … almost alien to his eyes. Some of them, not all, were paired up with lists of translations.

“What is this?” Sen asked.

Emorynn’s eyes widened, as if she, too, was seeing the papers for the first time. With a slight tremble, she shook her head. “I saw it. I saw it all. In the blink of an eye, I understood. I’ve been writing it down since.”

“Saw what?” Sen said, concern creeping into her voice. “Emorynn, what’s wrong?”

Emorynn cocked her head. “It’s here. It’s listening.” Her head snapped to the side, her eyes bored directly into Poire. “What did you do?” she asked, her voice equal parts plea and accusation. “What are you doing to us?”

I’m not—Poire tried to say, I’m not doing anything. I’m—

“The end,” Emorynn said. “The end of all things. I know you can hear me!” she stood up from her desk, she screamed so loud the cords in her neck stood out, “Answer me!”

“Emorynn, who are you talking to?” Sen put up her hands, and tried to calm her down. Emorynn sagged under her ministrations, her voice as soft as a falling breeze. “He’s going to destroy everything,” she swallowed, and let out a pitiful sob. “Everything. I can see it, Sen. I can see it all.”

Poire could only watch as Sen prodded her, and comforted her, and tried to understand what Emorynn was talking about. He saw Sen’s face grow dark with disbelief and worry as Emorynn explained that she could see everything, even the future. He watched as Emorynn grew furious with Sen for not believing her. When Emorynn screamed at her to leave, Sen shut the door, and the vision ended.

More. Poire saw Emorynn, the day she found the first sign of disease, an oddly-shaped freckle on her shoulder that had spidered out with eight black lines.

He watched her, accusing him. Screaming to herself in her own room. Desperate, she tried to spread her beliefs through virtual interviews, running the circuit on increasingly-fringe shows and entertainment feeds. Even the crazy ones dismissed her.

But not everyone. Some believed. Some, who had begun to exhibit their own visions of the future, began to flock to her strange prophetic call.

When she was evicted, her small, growing group of followers helped her move to a secluded junkyard somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Her old friends tried to visit her, but their conversations always came to the same dead end: you don’t believe me. What else should I say to you? Get out.

The infection spread. First, came the visions. Rippling through the populace. Bit by bit, as her visions came true, as more people began to see the future in their dreams, they began to listen to her. Her audience grew.

And so did the black disease.

Half of them grew rabid for a cure. The other half, resigned to the fate they had seen in their dreams.

And Poire saw, too, the Sovereign building itself in secret.

He saw a great gathering, tens of thousands crowding the halls of a Dam, some so sick with the vision disease their bodies were wrapped in bandages, stained with black. Upon an altar, Emorynn lead them all. Praying. To an outsider, it might have looked like a performance. Like she was pretending to her voices, and to see things that weren’t really there.

But always, her eyes followed him. Always, she asked him why have you come? Why must this happen?

Why are you doing this to us?

But Poire hadn’t done anything. Wasn’t going to do anything. He decided to search for answers at the end. Poire watched humanity fall. He watched the Lightning War, and cried out as trillions of machines descended on billions of unwitting people. The slaughter was unspeakable. The waste of life…

He watched it again, and again, from countless visions. The Swarm, rising suddenly from its hidden resting place on Earth, on Mars, and all the other planets. A trillion machines, acting in concert, all at once. Self-driving machines, suddenly increasing their speed before smashing into each other. Oxygen supplies, cut off without warning. Gas leaked into buildings. And then, when most of them were dead, swarms and swarms and swarms of fist-sized drones, blanketing the skies, buzzing into every building, every home, every hiding place.

There were surprising pockets of resistance. People who lived on separate grids, or who had taken extra measures against electronic tampering. Paranoid people who had left the close-knit communities of humanity and disappeared across the stars, who came back to fight for the very humanity they had tried to escape.

Such brave people. Such valiant deaths. Hopeless. Because even though they hid, the vision disease still took root.

He watched the founding of the first Conclave. Somehow, Poire had always thought that Gaiam, or Kaya as it once was called, was the only planet with these isolated research bases. But the Conclaves were scattered far and wide across the galaxies. Hundreds of planets, with dozens of conclaves each. They were trying to fight back against the disease. Then, when it failed, when even the unborn were infected, they tried to create children through other means.

Poire saw them fail. Saw the world swallowed up. Children, born in vats, isolated from all other life from the moment of their conception still succumbed to the disease. He watched the Conclaves go dark, one by one. And then, the Sovereign Swarm, sweeping over the planets, picking them apart. Destroying every speck of human DNA they could find. It made him furious, made his stomach clench. But the Sovereign wasn’t thinking. It was doing only what it had been designed to do: to stop the disease from spreading. To prevent it from leaping beyond humanity, and devouring all living matter.

The Sovereign had tried. Quadrillions of iterations, all leading to the same failure. It came to a new conclusion: eradicate the carriers, eradicate the disease.

Then, Poire found his own Conclave. He found himself, on the day he was delivered into the world. The robotic arm in his neonatal care unit had to slap his back several times, before he started to cry.

And already, there was Harrison—so much younger than Poire remembered him—and an older man, next to him. Auster. Sen’s lover. The one who had begun this whole program. And Emorynn’s friend, from so long ago.

“Are you the one?” Auster asked.

“Doubt it,” Harrison said at his elbow. “This one’s pulse is already weak. Mental faculties, barely presenting. He might not survive the week.”

“And yet, he might survive more than that. We do not discount anyone, Matsuka. We must never doubt, for all we need is just one to set things right.”

Poire watched himself grow. It hurt, to see how easily he grew frustrated. To see how he believed, truly believed, the other children were so much better than him when, looking back, he could see how close they had all been. Sure, Ceylan was faster at her tests, and Storni always seemed to adapt, and the others always scored higher on aptitudes … but they were only children, taking tests designed by humans who had no real understanding of the forces they faced.

Poire barely recognized himself in that tired, frightened, anxious boy. That child would never have survived alone.

Not without Laykis, nor Eolh, nor any of them.

When he pulled his head out of the water this time, his heart hurt. He tried not to think about them again. He ran his fingers through his hair, expecting to find it wet. Dry. Even his clothes were dry, and the pool was still, as if nothing had touched it at all. Odd.

He got up, and found that his legs were cramped and numb from sitting for so long. How long had he been at the pool? Poire turned in a slow circle, and for a dizzying moment he couldn’t find the stairs. All he saw were columns and shadows illuminated by that unearthly glow. He spotted the steps, and sighed his relief. Still, the steps looked different somehow, though he couldn’t say what had changed. Had that crack always been there?

He meant to grab another sack of stones, to walk it up to the Old Man and offer it, as a sign of peace. But the boats were all gone. The landscape had changed too, though that told him nothing. Instead of mud rivers and inverted mountains, he gazed upon a field of warped leaf-like shapes that kept curling up, like they were burning, only to reveal more leaves underneath. Huge white shapes grinded along the rolling plains, crushing the leaves and dragging slow-crawling static electricity in their wake. Even the outer face of the Tower seemed to have changed color, too. A faded gray.

“Hello?” he called up the stairs. And when no one answered, he started to climb. “Are you there?”

He didn’t notice it before, but part of the ceiling had collapsed. Chunks of rubble littered the steps, and had cracked one or two where they fell. When did this happen? A pang of worry gripped his heart, and he started to take the steps in twos, picking up speed.

At the top of the tower, he stopped, panting. Wide eyed. Trying to keep the fear from devouring him from the inside out.

The steps were broken. There were thousands of them, floating in perfect stillness, disjointed and randomly strewn across the sky. Some of them were still connected to each other, but so far out of place, Poire couldn’t hope to reach them. Pieces of them were so degraded and crumbling, Poire wondered how they could still have stayed together, even as they floated imperceptibly away into the sky’s brilliant oblivion.

Poire cupped his hands around his mouth, and sucked in a lungful of air, and shouted. “Poire!” His voice died out on the horizon. “Poire, can you hear me?”

There was a mark where the foot of the stairs had been. Old, dried up paint. So old, and flaking, it was hard to read.

“Couldn’t wait any longer. Follow when you can.”

***

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