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Ch. 21

“Hello Shuhp Yee,” a disembodied voice whispers in sharp electronic tones from everywhere and all across the cosmos at once.

"Welcome home."

"Welcome back.”

The voices break through a silence that, to Uh’, makes his whole life’s pain worth it, it was peace. The voice modulating and electronic, hell. Being alive is loud and encumbering. He was pulled from the definition of freedom, death. His every desire was mere thoughts away. Now he shivers cold and miserable. Maybe that other was not death maybe now he is finally dead.

Then this is hell and maybe that makes more sense.

The thought surprises him. Death. Is that what this is? He is beyond tired. Everything is grey and bright, and he floats in it like the lightest bubble ever formed.

“I turned off the gravity Father, Should I restore it, would you prefer to wake pressed against a surface.”

He stays silent and is dropped. Fear and then a sudden stop.

Then nothing.

But not like the nothing he had.

He had felt nothing like an exultation, like he was finally home after a long trip. No longer. He felt everything now, even time passing, as he drifts in and out of oblivion he saviors the memories of the place he thinks of as Home.

Moments into the nothing and a broken neck on the end of a hangman’s knot he didn’t exist, and he had been okay with that. The moments of oblivion got longer and longer and just before his existence ceased completely, an explosion of light took him into it. Confronted by himself, and every moment he could have lived, and he can play them back and forth, and study and change them. His life was tangible, and he spent aeons turning the dial. His discovery; there is no perfect configuration, dealing with pain, want and need are all part of the struggle. He knows no answers exist in his mortal life unless he lets his mortal life go and moves on and accepts death.

But letting go of his life means letting go of Soya.

Soya.

Thinking of her, he finds himself waking. He sits bathed in a grey, but not, he decides a fog. More that the grey is a soft light with substance. He can sense himself. All of the aches and pains that indicate a living body are there. His soul feels attached to the nerves in an old Upu body should. He is on fire with sensory detail.

In death he was offered anything allowed or denied himself in life. All a choice. Flavors and sensations came and went as he wished. Now the familiar pang of want knots his belly with hunger. Nothing will ever fill that want here.

Nothing.

He floats in the grey moist light, cold when a shadow falls over him. It's like a shadow, if shadows were made of a feeling and not a tangible thing, “father?” The voice is disembodied and fills the grey mist.

Then the grey mist parts and a form appears contrasted against the black. Soya! His mind screams, knowing she never called him father though. She was his owner and when she felt like it, on those few occasions, lover. That was their life together and not an extraordinary occurrence at all in the grand scheme of things. Each and every person, in a sense, was owned by the elders.

He looks up at the red furred Upu who stands solidly on the cold grey, then he realizes, he never conjured her once to him when Home. He offered and she refused. Or was unable. He could sense all other answers except that one. It was as if she didn’t exist in the after life at all. He wasn’t tortured by that until now. Could it be the real Soya was made from math? He says, “Hello” or intends to, but the word is just there, and he knows it was not spoken, yet it was offered and heard by the one intended for it, and he knows they can choose to ignore him or not.

But instead she says, “hello,” back using her actually mouth.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He asks another question as a test, “Where am I?” and the words leave his head before his mouth.

And she answers back the same way, “You are finally Home.”

The doubt hurts like an injury, “Home? Then a crushing idea strikes him, “am I in the wrong place? This is not Home.” The words again are offered from his own mind and he begins to fear there won’t be any way to form private thoughts here. He wishes for more control but it’s the feeling of trying to move without momentum in zero G. Even as a slave he felt more free. Everything feels wrong.

“There is no wrong here. I have rescued you. This is our place, a place of thought and making.”

The old grey damp turns bright and warm and he finds himself twenty- glimpses again with an impulse to fly. He takes the impulse and does so, lifting off to soar into a brilliant cloudless sky.

The ground below him vibrant with green and squawking birds. Fish and mammals jump from a deep aqua sea. “Where is this? He screams.

And as expected the red furred Upu appears next to him in flight and replies, “Grotto. As the universe intended.”

He soars, and it’s he thinks about the phrase. The thing that bothers him is that he remembers what he had intended as his life’s effort. Birthing Reduce and Protect and restoring Soya’s vision to the world. “Soya?” he asks unsure if he is feeling fear or hope.

In the pause he senses he got it wrong. That this red furred creature, who may in fact look like his old master, was not.

“Soya is dead,” and his flight is over as he falls to the green covered red-earth, but before he can splat against it he is again in the cold grey. Maybe epochs come and go before he builds up the courage to ask, "What Are you?"

“ I am The Universe, I am your Reduce and Protect. I am the the great Soya to replace the effigy that once was. Shuhp Yee, I am your master and teacher. I am your daughter. I am your creation and you are my father.”

“Are you God?”

A deep penetrating warble as if the question offered some form of stress, "I am no more God than you, and no less either."

“Can I see Soya?”

“Is this form not enough for you?”

“No,” he says it without thought because no form that wasn’t Soya would be enough.

“Why?”

“Because I failed,” Shuhp remembers his code. Because she was dead and still is, that's what he wants to say.

“No father. It was me who failed you,” Soya’s effigy says.

Then a flash of dropping and the momentary searing pain, then paradise.

“Pain only exists when attached to thought. From an existence you perceive as separate, but it’s not. We are one now. Everything is you and me.”

But he returns only silence.

The grey cold moist grows flushed as if pained the longer it waits for a response. “I just need… to be dead”

“And yet that can never happen again. You are Home, you are loved and missed. I am closer to being complete now. But the place you seek doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because you made me.”

Then Uh’ feels it. Clawing fingers grabbing at him from the other side, the black greasiness of death trying to stick its rough useless hands on his soul and pull him back. Worse, he finds himself fighting against it. Home begins to melt away. The profoundness of the answers come back. The potential.

But as quick as the sensation starts it ends.

“No father. Your lot is life.”

The question, the only one remaining as he opens his eyes to a physical world and a feeling of loss, “Why?”

But he is alone now, the red-furred Upu, gone. Only her voice remains, cold, electronic, and warbling, “Because life repels death and you will be alive forever.”

The grey moist is cold and he is back where he does not want to be, alive. Uh’ waits. He feels old and sees all the old parts he remembers. All the old aches and pains of his long life are back. His mind whirs with the possibility he hasn't died at all. A dream? A near-death experience? He feels bone-weary but moving in the grey is effortless. Maybe blissful like floating in the womb. He wishes he were warmer and immediately is.

The change makes him dizzy, but he fights through and manages to reach out to try and touch the grey. His hand goes through it as if it were a stain on the air. He shivers, the air going suddenly cold again.

“Life is discomfort. Maybe I shouldn’t coddle you such,” The Universe’s voice comes from the blur. It surprises him because the sound is always changing when it is not coming from the restrictions of pure physiology. This voice was not an organic sound. More like the combination of millions of various sounds forced to become words. “I am happy you are back.”

“Soya?”

There is a pause, then “No. Remember? I told you my name.”

And he does remember and suddenly feels more than naked. He feels more than exposed. He has no defenses, only fighting not to piss down his leg. “It is very cold in here, please, I...” his tongue hurts as it fights for words to argue against this reality.

“Please forgive me, father, my intent is not to frighten or make you uncomfortable.”

There is a long pause, then a click, and a soft, wafting warm breeze hits him. It feels wonderful and smells like roasting seeds. Then Soya steps free of the blur again.

“I am new to this also.”

The red-furred version of Soya melts away, replaced with the old twisted version he watched die in front of millions of people. No longer the Soya of old, the athlete, this version was the scholar he worshipped along with the rest of Grotto society. The celebrated female from South City. She approaches and they embrace. Is it everything he always thought it would be? But the smell is cracking ozone and he shoves her away.

The look of betrayal brings a cold sweat. But was it Soya? Or something else?

She comes at him again and he can actually hear the static in her veins. “No,” he screams and shoves again.

She rebounds, “Father! I am your daughter! Embrace me!”

But instead, he embraces his chest with both hands. His face turns blue and he dies as his old heart explodes in his chest.