No one ever truly knew their own mind, only its quirks. Nothing exemplified that compared to the montage of memories and sensations played across his conscious; years compacted in a glimpse. Between self-consciousness’ first inkling and the eternity of his mind, was a lifetime.
Absent from all but the rest of the world, his life flashed before his eyes not in the throes of death but that day when it all changed. The day he went from barely treading the deep blue sea, keeping his head above the water and began to breathe again.
The change was not a singular event rather, it was a cascade of several that started before the last day of Fall. Beneath brooding skies and crepuscular rays of watery sunlight warring against pregnant grey cast clouds and beside the feeling of potential was an inevitable, irrevocable culmination.
There was no transition, no marked threshold for when this change began. It just happened. He hadn’t seen the signs creeping on him like prejudice steeped over so many years to become as innocuous as habit; easy to learn and even harder to unlearn. It was like a swear or a curse finding its way into conversation unheard.
It was a syndrome, devious like sleep leadening the eyes or carbon monoxide poisoning the lungs before vision fades into oblivion. Or a misdiagnosed, benign tumour that grew until one day it was too late and the only date of import was the one on the epitaph.
He was there for all of it, an outsider like Laplace’s Demon in a dream sequence where he was both the watcher and the actor. It truly put things into perspective.
He’d never known how anxious he was in the penultimate moments leading up to this final paper of Avitech. Never had he known his mind to contend with so many trains of thought. Therein was a tristesse thrice wrought by lamenting his birth as history’s middle child; too late to explore the ball of dirt he called home but too early for the unexplored void beyond.
There was rue at his hesitancy to jump into the rage that had been and currently was crypto when it truly mattered and yet again too early for true immersive virtual reality that was at least a decade or two away.
Of course it was getting there one technological leap at a pace. It was just that he deemed it no good to experience it vicariously through the many monied masses. Or the works of fiction that had oh so become popular for his generation, a pastime lost in the worlds between the reams of paper and the web of pages.
He’d wanted to be there, in the moments that made history. Or core memories, whichever was first. Instead, he had to make do with normal days in jarring immutable reality, anchored to terra firma like a bird bereft of wings.
“ Time’s up people! Please hand your worksheets to the person ahead of you.”
A sonorous voice dispelled his woolgathering fugue as sudden contact shifted his awareness to someone behind him.
“ Lost your head in the clouds again Lev?”
There was a girl with a name just beyond reach. Whether it be a random face in a dream or a memory without the weight of attachment remained to be seen.
‘ Hilda? Matilda? Merilda?’ the sound carried through his consciousness like a drop sending ripples through stillwater.
It was disconcerting to hear the mental impression of his voice. His inner voice he realised there and then, was not how it imagined to be unfiltered, unaltered by its transitions to the physical medium.
There was no preceding sensation of his tongue uncurling from the floor of his mouth or his jaw muscles working, nor the movement of air that formed the voice from his lungs.
Nevertheless, he was not given leave for much vacillation as like a puppet on strings unseen, his awareness tunnelled to the subject of his focus to the detriment of all else.
The girl was a ginger head with bushy shoulder-length hair, a button nose and blue eyes. She had this memorable large frumpy sweater in burnt orange and splotches of paint resembling autumn leaves whose overlarge sleeves covered her arms until only half her palms showed.
There was familiarity. An underlying current of tepid friendship. Perhaps an acquaintance?
“ Sorry,”
A murmur. Movement of air between his teeth and a twitch of facial muscles. It might have been a smile or a grimace as fleeting as the fluttering heartbeat jumping in his chest. There was a rustle then booklet pages were quickly laid out beneath calloused fingers. There was motion and then it was stacked atop others of its kind and passed over.
A blush coloured her cheeks from the momentary touch of their fingers. She averted her eyes but the coquettish subtlety must have been lost in translation.
There was an air of exhaustion about himself. It registered as a heavy blanket of too much warmth that stifled reaction as though he was trying to think his way past molasses. That or he must have been too dense to infer what was being conveyed as the pout and smile that came after brittled to bittersweetness. Disappointment.
‘Was there some social convention I’d run afoul of? Just for a moment, spots danced in the near vicinity as his hands jumped to the edge of his desk, steeling the body against dizziness.
Then the malaise passed and attention was availed to checking his phone for anything of note. An awkward conversation breaker?
A sigh stole its way from his lips before the weight of a jacket and a backpack settled on his shoulders. Parting was perfunctory, out of politeness, smalltalk never his forte.
He left, down the aisle amidst the rustle of paper, infectious yawns, movement and susurrus of laughter. People lingered like contours in peripheral vision, expectant eyes wandering and watching for familiar faces.
Last minute goodbyes, some affirmations of staying in contact and half-made hugs faded away as long strides carried him through the hallways. He could tell the feelings were hollow with no depth to them.
He faded into a guy in the crowd, descending the stairs in disguised hurry towards the less used side exit, wanting to dodge the mezzanine and the milling crowds in the lobby.
‘It's over,’ his gaze jumped to the near distance, entranced by the view. Glass doors stood wide open, banners with congratulatory messages for would-be graduates looming besides.
Beyond the threshold, a world beckoned. A precipice. Another step, the beginning of another journey. Poignant catharsis tickled his eyes only for the warmth building therein to be dispelled by blinking as the first pattering drops of rain watered parched pavement and turned grey flagstones into brown.
He stepped onto the parking lot, a gust blowing drizzle and petrichor in his direction. It was godsent. That way no one would have mistaken the welling in his eyes for tears as made his way to his modded Vulcan Sprinter.
It was a break from routine. Something urgent about the day had made him eschew public transport in favour of his black steed with a heart of steel and breath of fire. Perhaps it had been that, deep within his marrow, he felt things coming to a close and he couldn’t help but hasten them along.
There, he unfettered the torque leashed within the engine’s purrs as the headlights woke. Beyond the rain trickling down his visor was the inexorable call of home.
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The road home was just a blip of recollection as journeys of the mind were wont to be. The mechanics of memory remained unfathomable but the element of intent that made mind-numbing transitions mere afterthought was undeniable.
In comparison, the ambience of home was a lighthouse hard to miss and even harder to pull his eyes from. Picturesque it loomed like a minor lord’s castle straight out of rural France weathered and given a stalwart character by age.
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A satellite dish and antennas broke the profile of the gable roof amongst the unused chimneys while blisters of networked cameras nested in the eaves. Red brick masonry and wrought iron fencing gone green with mildew and lichen encircled the compound.
Droplets of ebbing rain sprayed from ancient evergreens as wind rustled branches bowing over the driveway. As he approached stainless steel slats receded giving way to a garage humid with warm air and rent by raucous blasts from a music system belting indie rock.
Sparks flew from a screeching grinder machine that lit up the visage of a welder’s goggles as he set his eyes upon the only occupant of its space.
He divested his head of the helmet, feeling a small smile wrinkling his lips as he let the stand take up the weight of the bike. The smell of oil and metal cloyed his nostrils as a couple steps brought him past an old G-wagon. There, he caught his sister flick up the visors on the welding goggles as she powered down equipment.
“ Lev!” she smiled, unfastening greasy leather gloves. Tousled hair shoved out of her forehead showed a tanned forehead pearling with perspiration.
“ Hi Rina, “ he called back, a wet helmet, jacket and backpack smacking onto the hood of the all terrain vehicle. His sister grinned, opening her arms for a hug.
He melted into her arms, nuzzling the crown of her head under his chin, the scent of lilac in her shampoo body spray masking hours of work standing out in stark relief. A scent that marked her in his consciousness, like nostalgia.
The transient warmth of familial embrace ended too soon as hazel eyes with irises like honey in herbal tea looked up at him. He blinked, imagining the same eyes conveying maternal affection.
Resa Tyrienne, or Rina in short, memorialised their mother. His sister was an inch shorter with features that were softer and rounder to his sharper, taller masculinity. They nonetheless shared athletic musculature and the calluses of those who loved to work with their hands. She was a mechanic and a hobbyist tinkerer at heart.
For so long the love of taking things apart and putting them back and DIY projects was something they’d shared. The restoration of their parents’ bikes was a testament to their passion and knack for grease monkeying.
In her flights of fancy he’d helped her modify a 3D printer into a mini-assembly for tinkering parts and life-like props for cosplay conventions. The ornate swords decking the walls were functional so much so she had a licence for them thanks to HEMA. The guns were also true renditions of fictional specimens that looked a safety flick away from firing if lacking some exotic power source or munitions.
“It’s done?” Resa hummed walking backwards, peering up at him with arms folded at the small of her back.
“ Hmm,” he grunted, letting the front grille of the vehicle behind take his weight. He must have shown more exhaustion than relief or his response was more lacklustre than she’d hoped.
“Bro?” she grabbed his chin, tilting his head this way and that with an unspoken question. The brother in him knew what she was going to ask before she did. Which meant he was too late to drop the shutters on his face. She’d already picked at it, dissected over his expressions down to the twitch and drawn her conclusions before he averted his eyes.
“ It's nothing, “ he huffed in exasperation, firmly yet gently extricating his face from her fingers.
“ Oh, hell!” Her expression fell. “ It was today wasn’t it? I didn’t even notice Uncle Brandy's left the house.”
Lybrand was their paternal uncle, a rather eccentric middle-ager at the best of times and a functional drunk at worst. He wasn’t always that way, not after the loss of his brother and sister-in-law; their parents.
The ache of absence in both Resa and he was lesser than the pall hanging over their guardian. For all they’d been too young to remember when they died, an ugly part of him couldn’t help hating himself for comparing the difference of their grief.
They’d been five then and didn’t know any better, memories of them persisting as an amorphous blob of feelings, scents, sensations and voices.
“ Never mind, drinks then?” Resa chimed, pivoting before the next door.
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Another door, another transition. There was a marked difference from the moment he set foot past the threshold. His domain was a quintessential man-cave. He imagined his father and uncle must have spent their youth there just as he did, albeit with another form of entertainment as their father before them.
Attesting this was a small fortune of restored collectibles and tabletop figures, game rulebooks and literature on custom built shelves and a library of blue rays, tapes and vinyl records in glass cases.
The juxtaposition of the old and the new was evident in his additions of a coffee table and bean bags , the array of curved screens, a gamer's chair and last yet importantly the backlit custom built rig winking as its cooling fan whirred away.
Mood lights gave the place a cosy ambience while background lo-fi murmured in the background. To an outsider it was a very well put together ambience for relaxation or so he wanted people to think.
Beneath the veneer of mundanity was something extraordinary. It was why he’d been losing lots of sleep spending more and more time within and even less stewing on wayward thoughts.
Borne from dog-eared notes, unmarked components that were borderline unlicensed and hours, eyeballs deep in labyrinthine code was the culmination of what could have been their parents’ legacy hidden away from the world.
Things had just cannonballed when he’d kludged together a rig, some code and an Internet of Things from various smart devices. He was no genius, nor had he stumbled upon an epiphanous stroke of fortune. For all that he’d been cribbing off his parent’s work he was simply not that good. He made up for it with pure stubbornness.
The first compilations had spawned a host of cascading failures forcing him to take the core offline to debug the code string by string. He’d rewritten whole parts of subroutines, sometimes adding patches and whole updates before reintegrating so many times that he swore all he saw was code if he stared at the back of his eyelids.
Naturally Nikos and his sister had thought the hardware more forgiving, more tolerant of errors. Except there was no such thing as hardware adapting to software thus no reason it should have worked at all.
They’d never know for sure since the processor was not only blackboxed but also inviolable without looking up a spec sheet from whence it had come. A dead end since it had been delivered through a safety deposit box contingent on their parents’ deaths.
The only thing they were certain of was the material the processing unit had been contained within. Thereafter did they become circumspect when the gestalt of heuristic clusters began to grow in the facsimile of a human brain fanning the paranoia of stumbling upon something on the level of state secrets.
It was the sort of thing whispered about in conspiracy boards and liable to get people tagged and bagged by black ops. Luckily they were living under an uncle who had been a former military inculcated the importance of operational security.
“Ready?” he looked askance at his sister.
“Fire away,” she smirked.
An enter key was pressed.
A visualiser simulated the pulses flowing through a neural network as code run final diagnostics. Code finished integrating and rather than spout some generic permutations of a first greeting, the response was something out of left field.
At the time he’d thought the cause was a bleedover from all the material used to fine tune the morality algorithm. A feature of generative pretrained transformer subroutines had necessitated internet access for referencing literature and pop culture during natural language learning.
”Augmented Reality Computing and Intelligence System, ARCIS be mine name―”
“ ― If thy wish be mine behest, a watchword shalt I request.”
“I ask thee, es-tu mon sieur?”
“ I―”
The words jumped unbidden to the tip of his tongue becoming electric and pricking his throat as sound was swallowed by static yet his lips moved without his input.
It was a solemn oath, an aria that had been repeated ad nauseam until it was habit. Something only one other person would recall. A security provision they’d made so that none other might abuse his―their parents' legacy.
“ Arche of quicksilver and essence of arc, spark of enlightenment, illuminate as the promethean flame unto knowledge. Embody the virtues of light, your name is Arcis,”
It was just like Resa to make up something so cheesy, ripping off a reference that she used to nag him about.
Nikos turned, alarmed and looking at his sister.
Resa.
His sister was smiling, her own oration stolen by silence as simulated reality derezzed, shattering into innumerable fractals.
A migraine bloomed, sudden as an icepick striking his brainpan. Reality reasserted itself with cold, callous immutability as he wobbled on his feet a wordless scream dying on his lips. His hand was outstretched to catch―
Nothing.