976. Maxima opera, 3
(Rose)
R - Don’t you want to educate me about your grand design? If you’re going to leave anyway.
N - Rose Blume... Come and see for yourself. I will make you a part of it and me.
R - I will always be a part of you my dear... In pain and in hope. Thank you for replying and inviting me.
She’s inviting me to meet my fate. I’m aware.
I open my arms to her, in front of the computer’s camera in these glasses.
R - I need to hug you one last time to see you’re okay, before letting you go on your way. And we could take a moment to share more, and even study that conduit in my back if you’d like?
I get no other answer. She still feels condemned and like she had no smarter option. Not that I’m the most relevant one to blame her for that.
Maybe she took that tenacity and stubbornness partially from me.
- You will die...
R - It’s a possibility, but you shouldn’t underestimate what I can be. I will do whatever it takes to make sure she’s not just lost in a bad dream she’s unable to wake up from.
The ghoul doesn’t get what I mean. I know full well how beings-like-her can feel, and how their emotional perspectives can become obsessively screwed up.
I need to shake her enough so that she recovers some perspective of her rusty tilted balance. Nothing more. I don’t need a smile nor a thank. Only to know that she won’t suicide herself blinded by amorphous and self-inflicted hatred.
R - Nightmare, you can try to catch me and dispossess me when I arrive. I’m coming to frighten you awake one good time. Just enough for you to realize you don’t have to remain stuck in your current nightmare. Then, I’ll wait for your possible return in the kingdom.
I’m about to cut the communication, to get myself ready for an awful fight. But some last words swell away from me uncontrollably.
R - I love you... You will always be a good part of me, and I...
I will always remain a part of you. Whether it’s a painful stain in your heart, or a lingering hope when things are dire.
~
I’m starving and thirsty. I compensate with Blume inside of me. We waste nothing. We even shunt momentarily useless organs inside, to optimise the activities.
I scrap a piece of the ship to make a sword of, by habit. I’ve come to feel a little safer with something in hand to focus on, even if my power is far beyond and has nothing to do with it. I’ve thought of picking up a shield as times, but I’m feeling more confident like this somehow.
- You should go before we get in.
R - ... Thank you for helping me.
I give the poor thing a hug. It didn’t ask for anything. Neither help to escape nor mercy killing. So that’s all I gave for now.
I put the helmet on, and head outside.
~
Oh goodness. I want to vomit. Just feeling this sensation of falling endlessly.
The sight of Earth terrifying me. The sight of the moon, about the same size and weirdly bigger than usual.
I regret very much having come here right now.
My heart hates it, bad. My head as well. This dark unending ocean is terrifying beyond my animal reason. I was never meant nor made for this.
But I hold my resolve. I have to shake my sister who suffered the same for an eternity.
Before she does something she would really regret on a better day...
I climb beside the vessel, nervously. I look around for our nearing destination. I see ripples filling the sea of stars.
A planetary construct appears through the waves agitating its surface as this ship approaches. And here I thought this huge spaceship I boarded and its tower were megalomaniac. They were a few hundreds of metres high.
Kosmos was incredibly immense. This, again, is another order of magnitude bigger. It’s not animal shaped at all now however. Thankfully?
What she has built... It’s far more than a spaceship as I would have figured it.
I only gaze at one surface of something kilometres wide on this side. I can’t really define its shape since the surface is immense and mostly an all absorbing black.
Not a sphere, nor a cube probably. A disc? No. I can’t figure it out. It’s too close and immense like a landscape, and doesn’t reflect enough light for me to say.
It’s a landscape in the desert at night, while this voluminous plane floats its way toward it now.
For a landing where I trust my ghoulish friend that I’m better avoiding.
I’m terrified. I’d rather have to jump from a real plane over the sea at night. Tenfold.
I try not to look back, where Earth is bright. My hands shake as I resolve myself. I can’t see where I’m going...
But I have other ways. I focus that old way. The cells in my eyes become reactive to the coolest irradiations of T.I; as if I wanted to see warmth below normal light.
Ah. Now I begin to notice ley lines, or rather electric current lines in the landscape. The space is so void of T.I; their faintest articulated use and decay is easily noticeable to me. It’s not bright though. Noticeable in the void but not bright like anything floating along the invisible sea on Earth.
It’s downright miserable even.
In a single seed of artefact I hold here in my hand, I seem to hold more power than these kilometric wide architectures we approach. This looks so dry.
Another hive maybe lies down there. A swarm made with the minimum amount of chemical and T.I. supplies, and adjusted to work originally on Selenic sands.
It’s immense. We keep approaching and I can’t see it all. It appears as an endlessly growing wall or ground as we get closer.
It’s wider than a city probably. Its surface seems to absorb as much light as it can from outside. Its peak absorption is around sunlight yellow apparently.
As we get really close, I notice some bluish to turquoise hues reflected in spots.
I let go of the ship, trying to keep my heart from breaking.
The ship heads into an apparent opening chasm. I pulse a little momentum away for myself with my artefact, to see the ground and slow down before I land.
I see grass being flattened by my spell as I approach, before I reach it. I land flat and struggle to stay still. I’m bouncing back in this nearly absence of gravity.
After some clumsy struggle, I stand in a grass field under the sea of stars. The computer of my suit doesn’t speak but still highlights how nervous my body is. I haven’t eaten for days and I’m in space, of course I am!
I walk in the grass carefully, that is wavy like algae. It’s dark. It absorbs light and transmits the energy to nerves or roots below. It’s not soil but porous rock apparently.
It’s eerie. I can see my shadow over me too sharply under the sunlight, but barely where I walk. I notice it’s like an oceanic floor field of algae.
But it’s a spaceship of unfathomable size I’ve landed upon. And I know I’m not welcome exactly.
It will be a fortress, to her heart.
I’m not legitimate to break in... I’m not the good hero sadly.
But I’ll look for a good conclusion, a good way. I’m your lady of changes, and all I want... is for you to enjoy your life truly.
If I’m right, I will wake you from your current bad dream.
~
