Being conscious again was a gradual process as each part of my mind woke up gradually and steadily. Initially, I was aware of nothing but the sensation; a raw throbbing that I felt was somehow located in each and every particle of me. Then, gradually, awareness. For the moment, I was on my back on something that was both cold and hard. There were electric vibrations and pulsating air currents, if I could use such expressions, present in the air, but not visible.
I opened my eyes and squinted against the light that doesn’t originate from any particular source but is present everywhere in the environment. Finally, the fog in front of my eyes began to dissipate, and for a moment I understood that I had no longer met in an alien country we found ourselves. But neither was I back on Earth.
I was… somewhere else entirely.
Gently, I prepared myself and stood as calmly as I could, taking my time to do so. Everything at which one could point and stare was chaotic. In the light of what happened, it was nearly as if the concreteness of being was in the process of dissolving, as if one reality was merging with another, as in a watercolor painting over a piece of wet paper. In one direction I could make out the city skyline of New York, but it was distorted by a series of crystal-like structures that glowed eerily. In another there was a huge jungle and huge trees of the pre-Cambrian age through which clean flowing data streams ran like rivers.
“Zoe? Chase?” I asked and for some reason my voice sounded very distant, and yet I could hear everything around me amazingly clearly.
There was no response. As I recall, my fellow teammates were nowhere to be seen from the same period. . The feeling of panic that threatened to engulf me was suppressed by me as I tried to understand the situation. In such a situation, I did not have the luxury of allowing the situation to overcome me. Not here. Not now.
After that, I attempted to call out, using my extendable senses in an effort to reach out and touch the base located back at our community. Nothing. I felt as if a neural link had never been formed between me and whatever was going on inside of me.
I whispered it under my breath, saying, “Okay, Brianne. ” “Think: what is the last memory that you have?”
Recollections of that place, of the enormous entity which had given Chase visions of evolution, of what Alessandro had told them about the impending collapse of dimensions. And then… the effort to turn as we changed our pace in a bid to go back.
“It does leave the tear,” I recalled saying. “It must have… fractured somehow – shattered us. ”
In the manner that a conversation seems to physically change the way around one’s words, the reality surrounding me glowed. It was as if I was experiencing time-space warping; I became attracted by one of the overlapping planes which resembled the Earth.
I began to advance slowly, and every movement seemed to me that it was a heavy effort to wade through some sort of liquid. It triggered numerous conversations going through more and more frequently reached frequencies as soon as I approached the section resembling Earth.
“…can’t just give up!” That was Alessandro’s voice, which sounded tense and afraid of something.
“We’re not giving up,” Morris answered with a tired, but firm voice. “But reality is what it is. We have not been able to communicate with them for the last three days… The tears are increasing in number at a very rapid pace. If we do not make up our minds shortly, then…”
I attempted to make a noise to get their attention, to inform them that I was there, but I could not make a goddamn noise. To be right, it was as if it was a movie, the audience is able to see and hear what is happening yet cannot physically interfere.
In the blink of an eye, I saw a completely different picture. I no longer focused on the messy office that had become our command center but on thousands of people occupying what could be compared to New York’s Times Square. On the giant screens above them, faces of world leaders flashed by, all delivering the same message:
“…a clock is ticking. We demand that each being of this world chooses his side: Ascension or Preservation. The fate of the human species, the fate of the universe itself, depends on this choice. ”
My mind reeled. 72 hours? In retrospect, it had felt like minutes since we had entered the tear. And now… now the whole world was on the brink of making this impossible decision, of choosing that which was hardly possible to choose.
The scene changed once more, but this time the transition was a lot quicker. I saw bits and pieces of cities destroyed, people cowering behind gunmetal barricades, and others rejoicing at the end of the world with fanaticism. And as for it all, tears in reality started to gain more size and definition; the space between the worlds faded.
In the surreal haze, I suddenly sensed a figure at my back and I quickly turned around thinking I would see the apparition of this alien-like figure that appeared before. Or in other words, instead of seeing the face of another person, I met… myself.
But this wasn’t me as I was now still inside, they left states up to interpretation. This was the ascended version I had seen in that cosmic vision, and it was of a being of pure energy and light form. She had eyes of her own (or were they even eyes?), containing eons of knowledge and the weight of galaxies.
“What… what is this?” I asked, as I could barely speak. “What’s happening?”
They ascended me, gave her the up-tilted head that was so utterly intimate and yet so utterly foreign. When she spoke, her voice went straight into the core of my being and not my head.
“You are seeing the echoes”, she told me. “The waves of decision which is being made or has been made or will always be made. ”
I cringed and wound my neck, in a bid to cope with the shock that established Sharon was behind all this. “Oh you do not get it! Let me guess, are you hoping that you will be? Or are you pleased that they are?”
“I am you,” She was explicit. ‘A potential you that is concerned with ascendancy but still the you that is not me. Not now. Perhaps never. But everything hinges on the decision’.