Rivers of the Mind Season 2 Episode 2--Horizon One

Narrator: The Deep Space Exploration lab was located miles underground, behind a park that all the people in the town knew as Blackberry Creek. Growing up, it was the stuff of urban legends, a place that kids dared each other to try to look at from the surrounding hills. It was a water treatment facility, nominally, but some water treatment facility it was—surrounded by electric fences, with armed guards seen from time to time in the name of counterterrorism, located in a dense forest filled with security cameras, more befitting a prison than anything else. In the old days, back in the 50’s and 60’s, local mythology held that they’d run mind control experiments for the CIA deep within its walls.

As we neared the entrance tunnel, I could feel screams and moans echoing off its fresh painted walls. When they built it, they'd concealed it under the building, keeping it well out of view of even satellites. A tram drew us deeper and deeper into the icy blackness of the laboratory, its stuttering gears producing a sound that rippled in austere, geometric shapes against the walls.

They showed us to our quarters, and took John to a lonely hospital bed where he lay down, hands crossed over his chest, breathing heavily with his eyes closed. I found my way from my room to his, and I sat down next to him. It was all too familiar to me—my grandma had hardly spoken the last few visits, and so I was used to the silence of hospitals—a silence which seemed to burst with activity, with voices everywhere but where you were, curving around you and eroding you into an island, one where nothing truly existed but you and that faint, constant beeping, reminding you that the person you are with has a still-beating heart, but little else, reminding you as well of where you are and why as you sit in silence, watching, wishing they could speak, compassionate but helpless, utterly and profoundly still. I’d only really met John twice, although we’d met in dreams before we met in person—sure, a friendship had been built up, but I hardly felt that I should feel so profoundly troubled by his condition. But I did. Something was at work there, something awful. Inside his mind, two languages waged war over a muted and dampened English subconscious. The first language, when I shut my eyes, manifest as fractalized, kaleidoscopic rotating pyramids and spheres made of of light, spreading in a panoptic resonance across the surface of the earth. LSD, or, I suppose that would be one of many versions of it. In that language the trace, the distant memory, of its multiplous forms had been encoded through an outwardly simple pattern—it sat in the bellies of fishes in the sea, and awakened their minds to the fragility of the universe; it lingered in the seeds of unborn flowers so as to teach them to ways of the sky; it danced with the grass of the field so that every fiber became a pillar holding up the heavens. In all of these plants, the spirit had formed an alliance against the Beyond, acting as a common language which spanned continents, resurrecting across evolutionary timelines, constantly changing forms and finding new bodies to inhabit.

But then the other language—the invader—in my eyes, it appeared to be a great white flower, one which pulled against my memories and against my body's senses so that I felt myself shrinking—I felt myself drawn to the center, watching my memories unlatch themselves and come untied like balloons, which floated into the beyond—the longer I stood before the language, the more it deadened my own attachment to time. I felt my personality, my identiy, as a distinctly far away entity, locked somewhere in my skeletal muscles and deep brain stem, leaving me alone to a dreamlike chaos. As the language pulled me in, I pressed against it, learning its layout, its grammar, rapidly absorbing its vocabulary—this amused it—was I a white flower? The flower laughed, and pulled away, realizing that it had no power over me. The two of us rapidly became equals—and their name came up from the depths of my own ancestral memory; the nodding flowers. They were cosmic jesters, angels of death, agents of rememberance and forgetting. Transdimensional, unfixed in time, dead and undying. Filled with secrets, their minds formed an ever shifting labyrinth. Their designs of empire on the universe we knew predicated itself on their invisibility. That I knew their language at all, that I could recognize them, brought them terror. And they had John.

“Let him go.”, I commanded, in the language of white flowers, speaking in words which shifted across eons like water poured down a thousand pipes. In response, someone grabbed me by the shoulder. A teenager in a grey hoodie appeared in the room before me, his eyes bloodshot, his yellowed, grimy teeth smiling with a bezerk intensity. He held John’s neck in a chain. “Let him go?”, asked the teenager, “Are you sure you’re ready for me to do that?” I trembled, gritting my teeth, and clinging to the sides of the chair, unable to speak, and unsure of what he meant. John sat up in his bed, eyes still shut. The boy flickered in and out of reality; he decomposed and recomposed seemingly at random. He leaned down, and took my hair into his hand, sniffing it. I wanted to jerk away, but I could not. We were inside of my mind—the transition had been seamless, but I was quickly aware of it. Still in his language, I closed my eyes, and folded in on myself, becoming lost in an abyss—the hospital room, a lonely outpost in the blackness, shone down below me, where I witnessed the imagined scene displayed in third person. His face, bigger than the horizon, suddenly appeared above me. He was holding a pencil, sketching out the details of our present reality—I saw the hospital room copy itself, dividing like a cell until it filled what looked like an infinite piece of graph paper.

I crashed down back into the hospital room—the first version of it, I think, that I had been in—and crept up behind the boy. Drawing from the language of white flowers, I reached my hands back, feeling them grow and stretch until they became sharpened claws, as long as butcher knives, and I drug them down his back. Screaming in pain, he fell over, leaving a pool of blood on the floor of the hospital room. A response came quickly from a parellel timeline--he emerged from the door and pushed me through the wall—this sent me backwards into another version of the same hospital room, where the boy sat ready with a knife—as I suffered a temporary death, my vision exploded in light for a moment before I found myself again above the infinite hospital rooms, drawing down on them. The timeline had looped back again. As I started to fall, I reached into his language, understanding the device through which he had drawn out this hospital room into infinity—my body expanded so that it reached the size of a planet, looking down onto the surface of his consciousness, which hovered over the ever evolving surface of the hospital rooms. I duplicated his efforts, and in doing so, duplicated my own, so that we now fought against all possible versions of all possible rooms. Outside of my head, I felt a huge metal block rear down against me, a sledge hammer, knocking out my teeth and sending me to the floor—suddenly into the only hospital room of which I was aware.

Before he could deliver a killing blow, another version of myself fell down from the sky, shooting him with purple lightning. The final copy of my mind pulled me in, until I forgot that I had ever been apart from it, and the graph paper began closing in on itself, until layer upon layer of reality became exposed and pulled away from me on an ever-shifting magic carpet of graph paper. He grinned, projecting an image into my mind by hijacking John's powers. I saw a world destroyed by fire and radiation, torn into an unreality by the Beyond. The ghosts of the fallen rose up like transluscent shadows to rebuild smoldering cities according to the teenager's command. All sentient life began to fall across the galaxy, across the universe—replaced only by ghosts and the ashes over which they toiled. John stood by his side, his eyes glowing bright white, watching over the ghosts—I stood on the other side, a minister of war, helping him subjugate the universe. But it was easy for him to see that I would remain an enemy—he could neither sway me to his side, nor defeat me. I was the one obstacle he faced to at last becoming a god. One way or another, he would kill me. And if he had it his way, he would do so slowly.

          “Meagan? Meagan, are you okay?” Dr Whitebalm asked me from the door, as I switched from the language of the white flowers back into English. Standing up from my chair, I awkwardly teetered back and forth as I regained an uncertain grasp on my muscular system once again, becoming conscious of my body piece by piece. How long had it been? It felt like hours—days even—that I had been stretched across the possible iterations of the psychic battle—yet the clock above the hospital bed showed only a few minutes had passed. She'd seen it, perhaps detecting in the air whatever strange anomalies were occurring. I nodded, nervously. “Just visiting your friend?”, she asked. Her eyes filled with suspicion and paranoia, but also a genuine and passionate scientific curiousity—she knew she was no longer alone.
“Yes—I was.”
Without saying another word, she drew the door shut behind her. “What do you want?”, I asked.
          “We need to talk.”