“Victor! Did you hear what I just said?”
“Yes! And you?”
She nodded.
He unzipped his pants and pulled them down past his hips, along with his underwear. Linda looked him squarely in the face, and then at his limp penis, and crawled closer. She ran her tongue down his shaft; her lips lingered on his balls, gentle kisses rocked by turbulence. Victor opened the pillbox, took the fifth capsule for the day, and stared at the lines of light as they weaved impossible geometric patterns across the smartglass. Linda’s mouth closed over him as he grew harder, willed himself to believe, to turn the sensation of pleasure into the faith he so desperately needed. He concentrated on the blood pulsating through his veins, on the beating of his heart, on the Zen state of pure love of a dream within a dream.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was somewhere else.
His name was no longer Victor. He was Surl Adiz, and he remembered his every reincarnation over three thousand Standard Galactic Years of existence. His latest form had been that of Man, one of the few sent to discover and colonize new worlds; a mission to create Man, where no Man had been before. His partner, and the only other crew member on their terraformer-class vessel — the female Man, Surl Adiza — entered the observation deck.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, looking at the third planet light years from a star the planet’s new inhabitants would surely call The Sun.
“Do you think it’s worth it?” he asked. “Creating another race in our image? How well do you think we did, if we have to roam the galaxies to plant the seeds of doomed civilizations?”
“They’re not doomed,” Surl Adiza replied. “They have a choice.”
Victor beat his small yellow wings furiously as he flew over the river dividing The Garden of Slaves. His butterfly senses were attuned to the movement of the wind, not self-observation, yet he knew through the ancestral memories of his insect body he’d once been Man, and the people who worked in The Garden were not.
The naked, navel-less men and women labored silently on both banks, pushing the terraforming process along. They were drones with no understanding of good or evil; flesh constructs created in Man’s image, designed to obey neural net instructions recorded millions of years ago. Victor twirled his little body to catch a gust of wind, then landed on a lily in the shadow of an apple tree in the center of a circular clearing. A man and a woman stood nearby.
The woman’s tanned curves seemed beautiful, even to a butterfly. The man, not so much; he jerked erratically as if holding onto scarce threads of impulse control. Not even a man, really; this being was merely an animal stripped of all awareness of the world’s goodness. The butterfly switched its attention back to the woman and nearly dissolved in the multidimensional depths of her eyes.
“Hello, Victor,” she said to the butterfly, and to the man at her side she offered a half-eaten apple as red as her hair.
A forced dive out of the dreamweb at an altitude of ten thousand meters was not a pretty thing. Victor snapped back to his physical body, spasming in orgasm. The visual cues on the smartglass illuminator had lost their magic meaning; the line between realities blurred, and he pushed himself down Linda’s throat, coming as she gagged.
He pulled her off by her hair and switched the smartglass to full transparency. The jet wing turbine no longer existed, as if the plane had been designed to be an air glider all along. Then he switched to the pilot’s camera feed. The cabin was empty.
“Linda,” he said.
She looked up, wiping her mouth.
“I didn’t get them; I didn’t get to the thought node. She threw me out. I need your help.” He sat her on his lap and prepared the smartglass for another dreamweb dive. “Look at these lines,” he said, opened the pillbox, and gave her a capsule.
Linda narrowed her eyes, and swallowed the pill.
“The world is out of balance,” he continued. “Truth has crashed with belief, and we are about to die. Look at the screen. Think of truth. Think of death. Think of war. Think how everything’s connected. Think of a fight, think of you and me against the pain of the world. Imagine letting go. Imagine you’re a butterfly.”
“We are,” she said.
But they were not butterflies. They were leaders of a Spec Ops unit preparing for an ascent up a snow-covered ridge, gloved hands tight around the grips of their automatic rifles.
“What’s the latest intel on enemy numbers?” one of Victor’s men asked.
“Insurmountable,” he replied.
Linda pushed her goggles up to her forehead. “Irina and Gabor are holed up in a mansion at the top of the mountain with guard posts at nearly every turn. Most of you will not make it, but some of us must.”
“Some of us will,” Victor said.
He cocked his rifle and cried, “Hua! Hua! Hua!” and the squad bellowed, “Hua!” in return.
Two checkpoints later, they lost a man to an ambush. The firefights were short and intense, with too few breaks in between. Bullets flew. Men died.
Linda was covering Victor from a sandbag encampment at the thirteenth checkpoint, when the last comrade-in-arms they’d conjured up had caught a bullet to the head, brains splattering onto Victor’s already blood-stained camo. Victor let instinct guide his aim; the rifle recoiled, and the last enemy soldier fell to the ground. They’d reached the top of the mountain.
A row of columns split the rock like teeth in a giant skull — the entrance to Irina’s mansion. Victor’s limbs went cold, and he imagined his plane losing altitude. How much time did they have left? Forty seconds? Five? Time was subjective. The air grew thicker.
Gabor walked out into the open, flames licking at his skin. Victor knew it was him, even though Gabor’s face had melted away from a charred skull, blue pupils in vacant eye sockets glowing like distant supernovas.
“Stop grinning,” Victor said. “The world’s disappearing.”
The burning man halted. “Not my world,” he said without opening his mouth. “Think about it. You are in an altered state. These chemicals your company brews under Mark’s patents are messing with your head, man. Nothing’s disappearing. Everything’s cool.”
“Everything’s cool? You fucking killed yourself, do you realize that? You are not you. Irina’s boyfriend’s dead.”
“Say hi to Irina’s boyfriend 2.0,” he replied.
Victor tapped his heel, signaling Linda to open fire. She pulled the trigger once, and Gabor closed the distance to her in a blur. He hit Linda in the chest with both hands — a flash, fire — and she flew through the air, disappearing beneath the clouds off the edge of the mountain.
Victor screamed, and went into a sprint, firing blindly.
Gabor zigzagged, heat turning snow into glass, and the burning man met Victor mid-jump. Victor transformed himself into cold water, splashing against the flames, parts of him evaporating; fire and frost caught in a battle of wills, where Victor’s was stronger. He held on to Gabor as long as he could before letting go and falling to the bare ground, again human, again in pain.
His enemy had hit the ground a considerable distance away. Victor tried to move. No such luck. The transmutation had taken all of his power. Instead, he watched Gabor rise to his feet. With the flames extinguished, he was a terrifying creature to look at. He picked up Victor’s rifle, took aim, and Victor closed his eyes, wondering if it would’ve been better had he never been born at all.