Monday, July 6, 2020

Chapter 61 - the iG

I began having very strange and vivid dreams about the time we first arrived on Triton.  They were not disturbing or terrifying, just very detailed and consistent.  Every night, I would repeat the same sequence of walking through a large hallway and down corridors to a central room where a man without a face was waiting for me.  For reasons unknown, I called him the iG and each time I turned to address him, I would wake up.

I confided in Kallos, then in Yuna and it seemed I was the only one experiencing these dreams.  Andrea, one of the surviving sisters recognized I was troubled and she guessed correctly that it was due to the vivid dreams she called Warp Sickness.  Some of the first sisters who were stranded on Alpha Centauri also described similar scenes of an unknown being and they believed it was the dead Alpha Centauri whose brain they were carrying onboard.  The dreams eventually subsided after a few years and most were harmless, except one that described crawling worm like snakes that were invisible and stretched for eternity to distant points of light.  All the sisters who had the dreams would eventually experience that final dream and they would cease soon afterwards.

I told her of the scenes and she was surprised at the rapid pace as it took me only a week what the sisters described taking at least a year before they reached the iG.  If the advance pace was consistent then I would soon experience the crawling worms within another week or two.  I shuddered at the thought and she assured me while unpleasant, it meant the dreams would end.

On the third night after my conversation with Andrea, I decided to face my fears and demanded of the iG to show me these wormlike snakes and he stood up suddenly and pointed towards me.  He then walked towards me and beacon for me to follow him down another corridor behind his throne that seemed to disappear into a white void.  And while I could not hear him speak, I felt somehow his words or perhaps his thoughts as he explained we were entering his consciousness.

The worms crawling through the void stretched for eternity and they touched all points of the universe.  He pulled on one of these strings and placed it on my fingertips and we were suddenly transported to another planet and somehow I knew we had moved to the other side of the galaxy.  He motioned to me that this was the birthplace of the Alpha Centauri and we walked through mammoth buildings of stone and light.  Behind each large door in a long corridor rested an Alpha Centauri encased in a thick fog that was more like solid glass, yet moved and hissed with our passing.  At least a million of these doors existed on this single floor and there were thousands of floors on this long dead planet.

They are now tombs for the last few survivors who remain suspended in time.  They continue to dream and persist in the void.  As I pass some doors that are now darkened and empty, he explained eventually some succumbed to the disease that has infected the void of their shared consciousness.  The crawling worms are the manifestations of that disease.

His pace became labored and he approaches a door that has begun to dim, he steps into it for one last time.  He was awakened by my journey to Alpha Centauri and wanted to warn me of what was soon to come.  As he rests his head to sleep, I could not help but embrace him and kiss him on the cheek.  I thought I felt him smile and the sense of gratitude as the fog dissipated and the door went dark.

The dream did not end and I continued walking down the many hallways realizing that my consciousness had been transferred somehow to their home world.  I followed a path and exited into a warm garden of exotic plants dominated with blues and reds with three bright suns shining overhead.  There were graceful machines, more like light shadows moving about and keeping everything tidy and everything in its proper place.  I could step through the shadows and they had no substance, yet they could grasp and move things about.

Continuing down for what seemed like hours, I felt no fatigue and reached a building that I somehow knew was a depository of information, a library of sorts and filled with many books of glowing balls of light.  I touched each of them and they imparted information, but at such a rushed pace that I could barely make sense of it other than glimpses of things.  I sought frantically for information on why our creators hated us, but could not find anything.  As the light faded into a sunset, I felt myself turning into vapors and I awoke back in my bunk on the Grand Traveler.

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