1164. About melancholia, 7
(Armylè)
Morhens had not exactly recovered, but anger still got the better movements out of him.
He walked steadily enough to Johann a little further. The younger man still was as calm as he ever was, even though the storm was reaching out to him.
His face changed a little still as it hit him.
Morhens yelled his name. As if he was scolding a child, making him mad. Johann was first surprised to see the doctor standing and then waiting for the information.
G - What’s this shit you’re reporting? Are your margins growing exponentially?
Morhens was furious, but Johann was unmoved. He knew he had done nothing wrong and it seemed odd the doctor had not understood it already.
Johann wasn’t sure if he should just try to calm him, perhaps the doctor was just delirious.
J - Terra in showed chaotic comportment above some specific intensities. The conclusion appeared obvious to me...
G - Chaotic? Are you saying random?
J - I’m not sure I’m following. We’re not sure yet of what’s happening, but the comportment is changing drastically after the thresholds highlighted. I’ve lead the supplementary testing while you...
G - Are you screwing with me! The thresholds are varying by more than 100%! Are you saying everything we’ve accomplished so far was just luck? Well! Is that so? It looks more like you all are incapable to do shit since the death of that fucking singer there!
Johann stepped back, being spit over a little too much to his liking. And yes, these last few days the experiments had mostly gone weirdly. Even the apparently steady Rutherford they had been to repeat before now was failing as well. As if something had changed in T.I. on a wider scale.
Johann had done everything in his power meanwhile, and recorded everything to try to understand.
J - I think our understanding of T.I. is still superficial... There could be an information aspect, or other interferences we have yet to identify...
G - I didn’t ask you for theories! I demanded useful results! What the fuck do you want me to do with these scribbles? Get me real results by tomorrow!
Morhens was just yelling to the point of breaking his voice. He was ranting and being unreasonable again.
He could not tolerate the prospect currently drawing itself.
It was impossible that everything so far had been an incredibly complex fluke. These reports showcasing only random wastes of energy and meagre results was unacceptable.
But a big influence had apparently gone missing, and T.I. was no longer working as much as it used to.
The eclipse of the suns was possibly over.
Morhens aggressively pressed the papers against Johann’s chest so he got hold of them.
The doctor then left, still making an aggressive face.
Johann was puzzled. In the light of facts, good scientists were used to question back their understanding. They weren’t meant to become dogmatic and expecting the others or results to bend to their will. Morhens had never been blinded by pride apparently, but now he seemingly lacked humility.
Johann would see what he could do, without certainty.
Some scientists that had heard some of the yelling and come around to check on them met with Morhens’ overflowing anger. He barked at some of them along his way.
The curious people scattered quickly.
Morhens felt that everything was escaping his grasp lately, and it was making him panic.
He cussed, again and over.
He picked up some things and left to return home for a little more rest.
But he never stopped gritting his teeth.
~
Morhens recovered consciousness after another moment lost.
He was at his home at least this time, and he recognised the wall and the little furniture he held.
His house was nothing special. He had never bothered personalising it very much. The idea was unkind to him.
To make this place more like him made him sick. He didn’t want to show his ambition in the way he changed his house. Even if arguably, it already had anyway.
He stood up with a grunt. For one to build his house to reflect his ambition, he had the research centre instead.
He went closer to the window left open to air the place. He couldn’t see outside. His thoughts lingered on the topic of this uninteresting house. His ambition really lied in the laboratory he had built with Johann...
What this borderline grim house could mean of his psychology, he didn’t want to think about. He didn’t like that topic. So he shoved these thoughts back to a corner they weren’t meant to leave.
He wandered around the strange house he lived in alone, and not often enough to care.
It was mostly that last fact that was visible everywhere. The rooms had furniture, but all had this lingering sensation they were never used and where abandoned for years. Which they were.
It was dehumanising the place a little, but it almost felt like a theatre background. It was not real, but just pretending. To be a normal house, for anyone.
Geder sighed again and went to eat something. The simple paste was enough.
When he was feeling low or tired, his memories were mostly returning to that fateful day, when for a while all he could see had been darker shades of red. Crimson, perylene, quinacridones and alizarin sandrakes. I would differentiate them.
He was munching something bland trying to forget.
His legs were tired he noticed, sitting there.
He was ageing and weakening...
Some occasional rest wasn’t sufficient anymore to recover what he was putting his meat through. Overworking by obsession and avoidance of something else, it was reaching system collapse.
He could only admit it, now massaging his cramping legs.
And his mind tired from focusing only what was aimed forward, was obsessively looking bad to this fateful day.
The one he tried to run away from. The red, the darkness, the thunder like never in here.
The only real storm he could ever have been through, a kind that never would exist in our city. Sharp, unbreathable, plainly deadly.
He had never spoke about it to anyone... And on this day it had become too heavy to put aside, it filled his mind.
That prelude was still his sharpest and most painful memory. Years did not erode it to become more kind.
The sensation of losing everything that had made sense in reality. His suit growing all too rapidly weary. Everyone else disappearing like fantasies. The technology of the mightiest city suddenly bending its knees to an astral oddity.
Humiliation and despair, all too rapidly.
To scars still shaking him thirty years later.
He could still see the uneven and sharp mineral ground between his feet. The loud banging noises and flashes of light from pink to red thunder falling around. The eerie balls of fire or boiling metals flying around.
All the unclear shapes and shades scattering. All the crystalline metallic shards shredding everything beside.
The world he had not been prepared for, even if it had only been for a short while.
Followed by the absolute abandon, the fright of loneliness inside. An astronaut with severed link to his station...
And the knowledge, even if foggy, that far behind they would nuke everything away if the danger were to rise.
Every possible fear, for his own life and for his country combined. Merging, opposing, rising and exploding in his mind. He had lost everything in an emotional perspective on that day.
Morhens was still trembling as he sat in his living room, recalling for the innumerable time his short journey outside.
It had only lasted for an hour or two after landing.
They were wiped, and only he made it to the hole that wasn’t really a cave.
And then, he had seen something else. Immense, bigger from the inside than it was apparently from outside. Endless and otherworldly.
He had seen it without helmet. He had heard everything inside that machine’s belly.
He had smelled the dust from another world, and touched it.
He recalled every non understandable experience from that moment. He brushed the weary singularity and caused its coronal ejections to blow in a wider dimension.
If only that had been the worst of it.
~
Never terrestrial meteorology had seen such a peculiar influence with what might at first glance look like a rock body from the asteroid belt reaching the south pole in trajectory. That rock hovering above the city and magnetic pole brought suddenly a new dimension of complexity to all too many fields of known science.
And the two teams sent to get some semblance of answers to decide rapidly, only returned with more complexity.
He had been lucky. He survived, when the storm began. When the light began erasing everything outside.
Under his shade as he plummeted back to our city, the scar of this immense shade would never leave him.
The memory of this jagged rock and what happened was burnt into his memory.
Morhens had a jolt, as he had been dozing off in this bad dream.
His hands were still unsteady.
The landscape outside was still all too steady.
He had seen the absolute end coming to our city, and it had not happened eventually.
An asteroid came, and our city was not disintegrated on impact.
The blue sun had most likely used its nuclear arsenal to blow away that threat, intelligently. And the weird thing disappeared from our screens as quickly as it had appeared a few hours before.
After the end, under a constant rain of ionising rays, we only wiped the surface of our domes with our sturdier robots probably. And then we eventually stopped bothering checking how were things outside, since everything had most likely died.
Morhens had left a nightmare behind, but something still was off in his perception of reality.
Always and every day ever since that day.
When he looked at the city outside, still bright and lively, it felt to him as if this was the real dream or limbo he never woke up from.
He had a glimpse of a frightening reality outside, and then...
All that throned after the end, were our exposed lies.
~
