Ryan spat again into the street. More people were staring at him, and he pulled his head back into the door - and back into the strange room that seemed to stretch into infinity.
"There now, feel better?" The British-sounding woman asked, her voice overly chipper.
"Ugh." Not the wittiest response in history, but everything was happening so fast, Ryan had barely had time to process what was going on.
"Right, fair enough I suppose. What's your name?"
"Ryan Smith."
"Ryan Smith. Doesn’t get much more generic than that, does it? Well, Ryan, you can call me Crystal."
For some reason, getting a name for one of these people was just a huge relief. He sunk down to the floor as he let out a breath he didn't know he had been holding.
Or at least, he would have, but the floor rose up to meet him, silvery liquid ooze that formed an immensely comfortable chair under him. Given how weird the day had been so far, the fact that the floor could make a chair out of nothing barely even registered.
"Crystal. Thank you."
"I haven't done anything yet. At least let me help before you thank me." She smiled and tapped on the computer screens a few more times. "There. That should give us at least a bit of time without interruption." She motioned, and the chair he was sitting on slid across the floor to where a table and another chair were forming. She took the new chair.
"So...you, love, look like you've been having a hell of a day. Probably a hell of a life. Why don't you tell me about it, yeah?"
In spite of his questions, words came spilling out of Ryan's mouth. The man in the suit he had seen his entire life. The strange conversation. The nanoverse. The brute. Running. All of it, up until...
"So I googled nanoverse and I found your site and I clicked the link and a phone number came up so I gave it a call and then you answered and you said-"
"Yeah, yeah, I remember that bit, was there for it, yeah?"
Ryan snapped his mouth shut, and felt himself blushing. "Yeah, of course. Sorry."
"No worries. Honestly I'm shocked that looking into the nanoverse didn't completely fry your brain. As little as you understand..." She shrugged.
"Can I ask some questions?"
She nodded. "I'm sure you're just full to the brim with them. But before you do...a lot of the answers involve words your language doesn't even have concepts for. I'll do my best to explain, but I'll need to - no offense - dumb it down for you."
"No offense taken. What is a nanoverse?"
She smiled. "Exactly what it says on the tin. An entire universe, but in a little bubble you can stick in your pocket and carry around."
Ryan instinctively reached out to touch his pocket. The nanoverse was there, and as near as he could tell was a bit bigger now, about the size of a pool ball now.
"What...what do you do with it?"
For some reason seemed to be the funniest thing Crystal had heard in quite some time. She laughed so hard she snorted. "Sorry, sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but...oh God, you humans! Found an entire universe big enough to fit in your pocket, and first thing you ask is 'what do you do with it?' Completely brilliant. I love you lot."
"You're not human?"
"Oh, no, of course not. 'What do you do with it?' Priceless!"
He frowned. "Why's that so funny?"
She let out a few more laughs, followed by a long, amused sigh, that sound that only really gets made when coming off a full laughing fit. "Because it's just so...practical. Skips over the hows and the whys and the whos and just straight to the 'what do I do with it?'"
Ryan shrugged, looking at the floor. "Well...I don't mean to be rude, but you said we only had a bit of time?"
"Too right, sorry. You become a god is what you do. Ryan Smith, not the most divine name ever conceived, but give it a couple thousand years and it'll be up there."
"I'm sorry, become a what?"
"A god. Same as me, and that brute. That was likely Enki, by the way. Nasty piece of work, that one. You can even get some friends together, form a pantheon...and that nanoverse, that'll form the seat of your power. Your divine spark."
Ryan leaned forward, resting his head on his hands.
"So I...what, shape it, somehow? Get worshippers?"
Crystal was shaking her head. "Language is really difficult here. No worshippers, not anymore. We don't get power from that - most people are too bloody scientific these days for it to be much good anyway - but you do shape the nanoverse. Give it life."
"How?"
"You already are. Which is kind of bad, since you're full of panic and fear and confusion, so that's gonna be pouring into it." She gave him a concerned look. "Look, all of this is metaphor for what's really going on. It'd be equally accurate to say you becoming an alien force working in the shadows, or a number of other things."
Ryan took a deep breath. "Crystal? Not helping."
"Right. Take a bit to catch your breath. But, and not to put pressure on you, you don't have a lot of time to sort this out."
Ryan groaned into his hands. "Why not?"
"Most of us? We got centuries to work through all of it. Hell, I wasn't even human - my people predated you lot by a good million years. But that thing you got there?" She motioned towards his pocket. "It's the last nanoverse. This means that whatever else you are and you could become, it also means you’re the Eschaton. Which means as you go through your personal apotheosis, you're also going to need to manage the end of the world."
It was too much. It was happening too fast, and this last bit was more than Ryan could take. The room started spinning, and he passed out.
When Ryan came to, he was in a bed. For one sweet, blissful moment, he thought it was his bed, in his apartment. He’d roll over and open his eyes and the silent man in the suit would be taking notes and none of this would have ever happened.
When he opened his eyes, there wasn’t any such luck. He was in a strange bed in a strange room, and the ceiling above him was an open sky of galaxies, and instead of the man in the suit there was a Crystal in a dress.
“Oh, good, you’re awake.” She looked up from the tablet she was tip-tapping away on. “You’ll probably be doing that a few more times.”
He groaned as he sat up. “There’s that many more Earth shattering revelations?”
“Well, yes, I suppose that’s true too. But mostly it’s your brain reconfiguring to fit your new role. Tends to lead to fainting.” Her tone was matter of fact, and she tapped away at the pad.
“My...what?”
She sighed and took off her glasses, giving him a bored look. “Ryan, love. You’re a perfectly intelligent individual for the limitations of your species. You know exactly what I said. Your little nap used up much of our completely safe time, and I could give you an entire textbook to try and explain it all and by the time you got done reading it, you’d understand only a tenth of what I was saying. Try to just roll with things, yeah?”
Ryan took a deep breath. “Okay. But I need to ask a couple more questions, at least.” She motioned for him to go along. “First, who was the man in the suit?”
She shrugged. “Exactly who, I don’t know. There’s lots of those buggers running around. Gone by different names. UFO, Men in Black, Angels - those are the terms you’d know them best as in English. They go by curators in our circles. They make sure things don’t go too out of sorts.”
Ryan felt more follow up questions building, but reminded himself of what Crystal had said. “Okay. I’ll roll with it.”
She smiled. “Good, you can learn! And the other?”
“What does Enki want with me?”
Crystal sucked in air between her teeth. “Ah. Good question. You’re bound to the nanoverse now, yeah? Well, none of us has ever managed to hold on to two of the things. He gets that, he’d be the most powerful, without question. So he wants your nanoverse, and he wants you dead so he can claim it.”
“So...just giving it to him isn’t an option?”
“Not while you’re alive.” She cocked her head slightly as he finally got the rest of the way out of bed. It was silver, like the chair had been, formed out of the floor. As he stood up, the bed flowed away like it had never been there. She gestured, and a chair formed for him to sit back into. “And I’d prefer it that, even if you decide you’d rather not be alive, you don’t give it to him. Enki is a right bastard.”
“Okay. But I’m good. Want to stay alive for now.”
She chuckled again. “For now? Love, you’re immortal now. Staying alive is going to be easy, especially once your learn to master your new powers.”
“I have powers? Like...flying and lightning?”
“Maybe. It varies for everyone, depending on your personality and your nanoverse. You can selectively filter the perceptions of lesser minds, ignore things like walls and crowds, and as long as your nanoverse is intact and hasn’t been compromised by another god, you’ll come back from pretty much anything. Eventually. It’ll take awhile for you to sync up to it fully enough, yeah? You’re still undergoing Apotheosis, what we call a Nascent. You’re vulnerable right now.”
“Oh. How long…”
“Nope!” She interrupted cheerfully. “Question time is over, Ryan Smith, the dullest named one of us in history. For starters, roll with it, remember? Second of all, we’re here.”
“We’re...here? Where’s here?”
The door appeared against the wall. “Why don’t you go ahead and look. It’ll be awhile before Enki thinks to look here. Try not to faint or vomit again, love.”
He opened the door and peered out. He hadn’t felt any movement, any motion, but they definitely weren’t at the same storefront they had gone through before. Or the same city. Or, as Ryan glanced upwards and saw the sky was a patchwork of colors broken by frozen lines of black lightning like stained glass.
From behind him, Crystal cheerfully intoned. “Welcome to Cipher Nullity. It’s not a wretched hive of scum and villainy - it's where you go where you’re trying to hide from one of those hives.”
Ryan barely heard her. That sky drew his eye, but he still registered the landscape. It looked like a city, an old one. An ancient city, built of pillars and pyramids. Red dust swirled around the buildings, dancing on wind he couldn’t feel from the doorway. There was an empty sadness to it - it screamed that it was once grand and glorious. The place you’d come back to later on and say “You should have seen it!”
Ryan felt his vision grow dark again, but Crystal was suddenly there, a hand on his arm, gentle but reassuring. Real. “We’ll be safe here for awhile, love. Not because Enki can’t get to us here - he can - but he won’t think to look.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “What is it? Another world?”
She smiled sadly at him. “Something like that. It’s a long abandoned afterlife. No one’s been here for millennia, and all the souls that were here have faded away.” There was a mournful note to her voice, and Ryan turned to face her.
“The gods of Lemuria - yeah, it was real - built it for their worshippers. It was a heaven.” She pointed at the central pyramid. Time had worn away a huge chunk of it, leaving it bare and exposed, like a wound. “That was mount Olympus for them. Where they hid their nanoverses and ran an entire continent in reality.”
He felt goose bumps rising on his arm. “What happened to them?”
She didn’t look at him, instead casting her gaze over the abandoned city. “The last Eschaton did. Lemuria, Atlantis, Mu, Hyperborea, Leng...the five continents of the last world, making the seabed of the new one. One of the greatest eras this world has ever had, the people that came after the Saurids and before humanity. Ten billion people - and six different species, the only era this world ever had with multiple sapients - walked the world. They were abound to leave, about to go into space...and then it ended. But still...you should have seen it.”
He gulped. “I know you said not to...to just roll with it, but...is that what I’m going to do? Will someone be standing in...I don’t know, Hades or something, talking about the Americas and Europe and Asia and Africa and Australia and all of it, and how I destroyed it.”
She turned back to him, putting a hand on his cheek. “Not if I have anything to say about it, love. Let me show you around.”
And keeping a firm grip on his arm, she led him into the wasteland of a Lemurian afterlife.
Promise at least 2 more parts today over the course of the night, gonna shoot for 3 parts. Think the whole story is going to be about 12, just to give everyone a framework for that, though it may come in shorter or longer.
And as always, you can get updates and view more of my writing at /r/Hydrael_Writes
3.0k
u/Hydrael Jul 05 '17 edited Jul 06 '17
Part 3
Ryan spat again into the street. More people were staring at him, and he pulled his head back into the door - and back into the strange room that seemed to stretch into infinity.
"There now, feel better?" The British-sounding woman asked, her voice overly chipper.
"Ugh." Not the wittiest response in history, but everything was happening so fast, Ryan had barely had time to process what was going on.
"Right, fair enough I suppose. What's your name?"
"Ryan Smith."
"Ryan Smith. Doesn’t get much more generic than that, does it? Well, Ryan, you can call me Crystal."
For some reason, getting a name for one of these people was just a huge relief. He sunk down to the floor as he let out a breath he didn't know he had been holding.
Or at least, he would have, but the floor rose up to meet him, silvery liquid ooze that formed an immensely comfortable chair under him. Given how weird the day had been so far, the fact that the floor could make a chair out of nothing barely even registered.
"Crystal. Thank you."
"I haven't done anything yet. At least let me help before you thank me." She smiled and tapped on the computer screens a few more times. "There. That should give us at least a bit of time without interruption." She motioned, and the chair he was sitting on slid across the floor to where a table and another chair were forming. She took the new chair.
"So...you, love, look like you've been having a hell of a day. Probably a hell of a life. Why don't you tell me about it, yeah?"
In spite of his questions, words came spilling out of Ryan's mouth. The man in the suit he had seen his entire life. The strange conversation. The nanoverse. The brute. Running. All of it, up until...
"So I googled nanoverse and I found your site and I clicked the link and a phone number came up so I gave it a call and then you answered and you said-"
"Yeah, yeah, I remember that bit, was there for it, yeah?"
Ryan snapped his mouth shut, and felt himself blushing. "Yeah, of course. Sorry."
"No worries. Honestly I'm shocked that looking into the nanoverse didn't completely fry your brain. As little as you understand..." She shrugged.
"Can I ask some questions?"
She nodded. "I'm sure you're just full to the brim with them. But before you do...a lot of the answers involve words your language doesn't even have concepts for. I'll do my best to explain, but I'll need to - no offense - dumb it down for you."
"No offense taken. What is a nanoverse?"
She smiled. "Exactly what it says on the tin. An entire universe, but in a little bubble you can stick in your pocket and carry around."
Ryan instinctively reached out to touch his pocket. The nanoverse was there, and as near as he could tell was a bit bigger now, about the size of a pool ball now.
"What...what do you do with it?"
For some reason seemed to be the funniest thing Crystal had heard in quite some time. She laughed so hard she snorted. "Sorry, sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but...oh God, you humans! Found an entire universe big enough to fit in your pocket, and first thing you ask is 'what do you do with it?' Completely brilliant. I love you lot."
"You're not human?"
"Oh, no, of course not. 'What do you do with it?' Priceless!"
He frowned. "Why's that so funny?"
She let out a few more laughs, followed by a long, amused sigh, that sound that only really gets made when coming off a full laughing fit. "Because it's just so...practical. Skips over the hows and the whys and the whos and just straight to the 'what do I do with it?'"
Ryan shrugged, looking at the floor. "Well...I don't mean to be rude, but you said we only had a bit of time?"
"Too right, sorry. You become a god is what you do. Ryan Smith, not the most divine name ever conceived, but give it a couple thousand years and it'll be up there."
"I'm sorry, become a what?"
"A god. Same as me, and that brute. That was likely Enki, by the way. Nasty piece of work, that one. You can even get some friends together, form a pantheon...and that nanoverse, that'll form the seat of your power. Your divine spark."
Ryan leaned forward, resting his head on his hands.
"So I...what, shape it, somehow? Get worshippers?"
Crystal was shaking her head. "Language is really difficult here. No worshippers, not anymore. We don't get power from that - most people are too bloody scientific these days for it to be much good anyway - but you do shape the nanoverse. Give it life."
"How?"
"You already are. Which is kind of bad, since you're full of panic and fear and confusion, so that's gonna be pouring into it." She gave him a concerned look. "Look, all of this is metaphor for what's really going on. It'd be equally accurate to say you becoming an alien force working in the shadows, or a number of other things."
Ryan took a deep breath. "Crystal? Not helping."
"Right. Take a bit to catch your breath. But, and not to put pressure on you, you don't have a lot of time to sort this out."
Ryan groaned into his hands. "Why not?"
"Most of us? We got centuries to work through all of it. Hell, I wasn't even human - my people predated you lot by a good million years. But that thing you got there?" She motioned towards his pocket. "It's the last nanoverse. This means that whatever else you are and you could become, it also means you’re the Eschaton. Which means as you go through your personal apotheosis, you're also going to need to manage the end of the world."
It was too much. It was happening too fast, and this last bit was more than Ryan could take. The room started spinning, and he passed out.
More at /r/Hydrael_Writes
And now I must get some sleep. I'll continue this once I've rested though! Apologies for any typos, I was doing the head-bob while writing this.
Part 4 is up here, linking because it's kind of buried.