Splintered

by Tom Underhill

conclusion

He could still feel the pressure. Even half a mile from the point where they’d crossed over. It was fainter... But it was there, and it was rising. The remaining soldiers seemed like they could sense it too; their firing was more sporadic, their bewildered looks and yells more frequent.

Finally acting human, first a few, then most, then all started to flee. Some ran for their original plane, some for the one Jason and the stranger had just left, and some just looked lost, never making it beyond the overlap as they stumbled around erratically.

But no one escaped; with a rush and a pop, the blending finalized, and men who had been opposed in life were united in death. Pierced by coalescing branches, swallowed by rising earth, distorted by excess air, every soldier screamed, and every soldier died.

Most of the terrain died with them, as space designed for one plane buckled and caved from the density of two. And then in a final, terrific explosion, the entire area simply burst.

The battle was over, and no one had won.

Jason vomited, wiped his mouth, and vomited again.

* * *

His leg actually held out for several hours, but when it collapsed, Jason’s determination did as well. He’d only been free of the first presence in his head for a few minutes before this new one began to enter. And this world was so barren, so desolate. And the way those men had died... “I can’t breathe.”

“Easy, Jason. We won’t be in this wasteland that much longer. Easy now.” Her hand squeezed his shoulder with just the right amount of pressure to bring him back.

He lay on his back panting for some time. When he finally had his breath back, he sat up slowly, noticed the stranger crouching next to him, and narrowed his eyes. “Who are you?”

She smiled, and rearranged her legs to sit down fully. “I suppose we can spare a few minutes. But I think it might be best to start with who you are.”

His look became even warier.

Laughing, she leaned back on her elbows and began tapping her left foot to a private beat. “I know that sounds evasive, but I’ll get back to me. That’s a promise.” The beat increased in tempo. “So as I said before, the universes are collapsing, falling in upon themselves from every possible angle and dimension. What should have been an infinite number of paths are converging into one, with catastrophic results... as you’ve already seen.” The stranger glanced back over at him. “You look good as an albino, by the way.”

Jason jerked his eyes away from his bleaching hands.

“Remember that it’s only temporary. But the larger process isn’t, and I’ve been helping you, Jason, because you’re the only one who can reverse it.”

It was his turn to laugh, but once he started he had trouble stopping, and in short order, he was howling. After a minute of this, his chest ached from the strain, but the hysteria kept coming...

“Jason.”

The awestruck note in the stranger’s voice cut through his panic as nothing else could have, and he was finally able to bring himself back under control. Once he’d done so, he looked over, and found her pointing into the distance.

Jason followed her arm with his eyes, and the last chuckle died in his throat.

* * *

Miraculously, his leg had managed the headlong sprint. But as he sat catching his breath on the porous, uncomfortable boulder they’d stopped at, Jason doubted his tattered limb had anything left. His attention, though — and that of the latest presence in his head — was on the line creasing the horizon.

A band of shimmering, translucent blue was spreading rapidly, already stretching unabated as far as the eye could see. It was hard to tell exactly how high the phantom was off the ground — they were still at least a hundred yards away — but it had to be at least twenty feet up at the lowest point. When the strip solidified, it would eclipse the sun.

But what had really arrested Jason and the stranger’s attention were the fish. Long and finned, short and stumped, flat and smooth; there were fish of every size and shape swishing through the ghostly river.

“I have to admit I’ve never seen that before...” Out of the corner of his eyes, Jason could see the stranger shaking her head and staring just as hard as he was.

They watched for perhaps another half hour, transfixed by the aquarium-like view, as the river kept elongating. Even with his focus on the fish, though, Jason could sense that the scene was solidifying. Slowly, but alarmingly surely. And suddenly he felt time was running out. “Who are you?”

The stranger stayed staring at the floating river. “I think the best description would be a failed version of you.”

Jason shook his head. “Try again.”

Chuckling, she glanced over at him briefly before turning back. “Believe it or not, had the timing been different, it would have been me lying there in that hospital, waiting for something, anything, to break the monotony.”

He snorted.

“Not everyone was unaware of the coming Collapse, though. My plane’s been preparing for millennia. Researching and predicting, keeping tabs and laying plans.”

The fish looked agitated. Jason could only shake his head again.

“Truly, Jason. And you’re lucky we have been, or everyone would be lost. But then not everyone wants to be saved. That couple for instance. Members of a lovers’ alliance, an organization of inter-plane soul-mates who need the blending to continue for their love to exist.”

Jason’s eyebrows raised despite himself, and after a moment he gestured with his head towards the now near-solid river. “They want this?”

“So much that they refuse to consider the true implications. Love blinds them to anything but the idea that one plane would allow them to be together.”

“Wouldn’t they be, though?”

She looked over at him with disdain. “Only in death.”

With that, the conversation would have been over anyway; the bursting of the river just ensured it.

* * *

Water merged violently with air, and the resulting explosion flung droplets almost far enough to wet their feet. When the air cleared, the blue river could be seen again, pocked by swirls of red that were rapidly incorporated into an unsightly black. And then, finally coming to terms with existing in two planes at once, the river began to gush out and down, creating a waterfall of virtually infinite width.

“Come on, before we get flooded out.” The stranger had stood up and started walking in almost one motion, headed, as usual, towards the spectacle and not away from it.

“Aren’t you going in the wrong direction, then?” Jason stayed sitting, resolved not to move as he watched fish after fish tumble down the falls and splash into the lake forming below the river.

Still walking, she called back in terse, simple words. “That’s a Join. We need to cross.”

Jason shook his head... and stopped, the motion arrested by an internal force. That same compulsion, stronger than before, forcing his legs to push up, walk, and then run. He fought it this time, screamed inwardly... and accomplished nothing.

When he caught up to the stranger, the compulsion vanished, but this time the memory of it remained.

* * *

Jason still scaled the tree after her, but he did so hesitantly; he was torn between following and running. His face must have betrayed his doubts; the stranger frowned as soon as she looked back.

She stared at him for a second longer and then dropped on top of him, grabbing him around the chest and pushing off the tree’s trunk in one smooth motion. Jason only had a moment to flail uselessly in the air before they splashed into the portion of the floating river the tree stood next to.

Totally unprepared for the impact, Jason’s lungs were empty when he hit. The stranger kept her hold on him, though, seemingly determined that they sink like stones. Which they did for the first fifteen feet... until their descent started to slow.

After a few more seconds, Jason began to feel the water below him pushing up almost as strongly as the water above him was pushing down. And then suddenly both directions were pulling as well; he felt like he was being compressed and elongated at the same time. As he suffocated, drowned, and died...

His head broke the surface, the stranger’s arms threw him with a familiar strength, and Jason gasped on a muddy bank. When he was recovered enough to take in his surroundings, he found that it was a different bank and a different surface; they’d crossed into a fourth world.

“We need to move, Jason. We’ve wasted too much time.” Her voice was uncompromising.

Still breathing greedily, he finally looked up at her. “You almost... killed me. You bitch.“

“I think the point of no return is approaching. Let’s go.”

The stranger started walking, and before he knew it, he was following.

* * *

Over the next few hours, Jason tried several times to turn away from the stranger’s path, but his limbs wouldn’t obey his mind. At least he was conscious of the compulsion now, though, even if he was helpless to resist it. And somehow the force ordering his direction was also holding his leg intact, letting it function despite its rapidly worsening condition.

He’d resisted making conversation for most of the latest march, worried that doing so would erase the knowledge of the compulsion again. His new appearance was also too disgusting for words, and the accompanying mental squatter was providing enough chatter on its own. But when night began to fall and blur his surroundings, the words came out before he could stop them: “Were you planning on stopping anytime soon?”

“We should be close.” She actually sounded a little disconcerted.

And then he began to feel it: not a building of pressure but a lessening. “I think we’re here.”

Whirling, she confronted him in the twilight, noticeably afraid even in the gathering darkness. “What can you feel, Jason?”

The loss of pressure was still slight, but it seemed to be accelerating. “It feels like... a vacuum is forming. Like the area is deflating.” He stopped talking when he noticed how many stars there suddenly seemed to be. How many twinkling, ghostly points of light there were, not only in the sky, but next to him.

Around him.

In him.

And the night’s blackness was being enhanced by something darker still... Jason could barely make out the stranger’s form at all now.

“Jason, listen to me.” She sounded frantic. “We’ve arrived; this is the point of no return. If you concentrate, you can reach the Nexus — the locus of all the blendings — and put an end to the collapse. If you don’t, we’re lost. I can’t help you anymore, Jason. You have to do this on your own.”

Something was definitely pulling him now, trying to expand him from all angles along every inch of his body, inside and out. “What the hell is happening to me?!?”

The stranger’s voice was effectively disembodied now; Jason could no longer see anything of her. “We’re blending with a plane where there is no Earth, Jason! You’re about to be cast into outer space! Concentrate, dammit! FIND THE NEXUS!”

“HOW!?!” His own terror was being amplified by the crazed screams of the newest intruder in his head. He couldn’t think, couldn’t focus like he knew he had to...

“Jason!”

He was bloating outwards, distending unrecognizably and irretrievably.

And a thought occurred to him. An incongruity that he latched onto, stabilized himself upon, and exited the planes and the compulsion with.

* * *

He sat cross-legged, his eyes closed to shut out the maelstrom just ahead of him. The infinite number of overlapping shapes, colors, peoples, realities... Possibles. All in their ghostly stages, creating an unending array of superimposed cultures and creatures, one upon the next upon the next. Utter chaos, but within that anarchy lay the answer. He’d known that from the moment he arrived; he was just waiting for the strength to wrest hold of it.

The question? This point would be the last to solidify, the last to join. Everything else would blend in piecemeal fashion, a combination here, a fusion there. But here... This would mark the end of all things that all things had known, signify the final transition from multiplicity to monotone. The question was whether or not he let it happen.

Opening his eyes again, Jason stared at the eddying universes before him. He looked hard — really hard — and peeled the layers back by ones, by tens, and then by thousands... until they all lifted with a rush. Leaving an enormous red mass behind, seemingly of all planes and none. Cleft in its middle, it looked like nothing so much as two textured spheres smashed together.

His strength had arrived; Jason rose to his feet to seize the answer.

* * *

A cacophony of voices streamrolled through his thoughts as he entered the red mass, his body flickering with the possibilities of countless physical variations. Each step only increased the weight of the multiplicity, and ten feet in, his resolve began to waver as he felt himself disintegrating into diversity...

Jason brought himself back by shutting his eyes and focusing on the stranger’s lies. After pausing to evict his unwanted mental tenants, he started walking again, his eyes still closed. He continued until he knew it was time to stop.

Confident that it was safe to see again, Jason opened his eyes and found himself at the point where the two spheres merged. He knew ghostly madness was still swirling just outside, but all he could see in every direction was the vibrant pink of the deformed orbs. Opaque but not solid, the spheres seemed to pulse in time with his own blood, each vibration punctuated by bursts of miniature lighting...

Her voice was an intrusion, but the knowledge that it no longer had any hold over him only added to Jason’s calm.

* * *

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Her presence was nauseating. “You don’t belong here.”

The stranger’s eyes narrowed, and she stopped walking towards him. “Jason...”

“And neither do I; the Collapse shouldn’t be stopped.” He smiled.

She didn’t. “Jason, you’ve seen the destruction with your own eyes! There’s no stronger proof! We have to reverse the process.”

“For whose benefit?”

The stranger looked rattled. “There are countless souls in the balance.”

“Really? I’m pretty sure mine is the only one.”

“That’s... that’s the most selfish thing you could possibly have said.”

Jason’s smile widened. “Exactly.”

Clearly at a loss, all the stranger could manage in response was a halting step he made her retract with a shake of his head. Her eyes voiced the question.

He answered quietly. “The planes never changed you.” And then he closed his eyes, focused fully, and she was gone.

Taking a deep breath, Jason concentrated even harder, and let everything collapse into one.

* * *

A bleached ceiling. Sterile walls. An uncomfortable bed.

He was back.

Jason took a long, slow breath before easing himself off the bed. Noting with satisfaction that his leg was fine, he walked calmly to the door. It was locked, but instead of pounding it in frustration as he would have only hours before, he shrugged and lay back down.

Almost immediately after reclining again, though, Jason heard the jingle of keys. Raising himself to a sitting position, he greeted the entering woman with a smile.

“Well, good morning, Jason. I’m glad to see you’re in such good spirits today.” She looked exactly as she had on the battlefield, noticeably plump and clad in the same immaculate white uniform. Pulling a chair up next to his bed, the woman returned his smile and opened the overstuffed black binder she’d carried in with her.

He studied it for a second, and then reached down to stop her.

“Jason, could you please keep your hands to yourself?”

Ignoring her, he gently flipped the binder back to the first entry: an identification sheet. With his name, his measurements, his picture.

And her eyes. The first stranger’s eyes, looking out at him from the badly cropped image. Unmistakably hers.

Leaving the binder in the increasingly confused visitor’s lap, Jason rose and walked to the tiny mirror hanging slightly askew in the adjoining bathroom.

His eyes... were his own. The stranger was gone.

Returning to his position next to the now thoroughly bewildered woman in white, Jason carefully removed the pen resting above her right ear. Smiling at her again, he crossed out the line on the first page that read “Axis 1: Schizophrenia.”

To Challenge 443...