Being completely honest, I had absolutely no idea how this whole teaching the evil Reapers the meaning of life or whatever was supposed to go. And Bastet couldn’t exactly give any more details. She was only working off what she had been told, and apparently the other Reapers hadn’t thought it was important enough to give detailed instructions.
Well, okay, maybe that was unfair. It was possible that there was something about this that couldn’t be explained, or maybe if they said too much or tried to guide us it would all go wrong. After all, considering my whole being from the future and not telling Gaia too much thing, I could hardly blame other people for being cagey with their information. There very well could be a good reason for it. Still, that didn’t mean I wasn’t annoyed. And more than a little frightened considering the potential consequences.
On the other hand, it wasn’t like I had much in the way of a choice. We couldn’t get out of the tower any other way since even the good Reapers couldn’t (or wouldn’t) help, so either we were going to unleash these universe-ending monsters and end up completely changing the timeline for the worst, or we would successfully help them transition. Or ascend as Bastet had put it. It would either be the end of my universe and the death of everyone I ever knew throughout my entire life, or I would fix it. But hey, no pressure.
I also had no idea what to expect to see when Percy and I stopped through the door, followed by Cerberus and Eurso, both of whom were making soft, uncertain noises about being here. But of all the possibilities that passed through my mind, what we actually saw didn’t fit any of them.
I was home. Or at least, back in Laramie Falls, in the modern day. I was standing near the bowling alley where I had met with Seller. God, did that ever feel like it had happened eons ago. It was a bright sunny day, and the whole place looked just like it had the last time I’d been there.
Turning around quickly, I couldn’t see the door we had just come through. The other three were there, staring at me curiously, while I took in the sight. It was just the parking lot of the bowling alley. I could see every other building that was supposed to be there, along with cars parked nearby or on the street. We might as well have simply time-traveled and teleported straight to my home city on the last day I had been there.
Except, no. There was something off, something wrong about this whole thing that stood out the more I stood there and listened while looking around. There were no sounds. I couldn’t hear any cars moving, or see them either. They were parked around us, but none were in motion. I couldn’t hear any people talking, or even any birds chirping. No cats, or dogs, or anyone walking, or anything. There were no signs of life. The entire city was eerily silent in a way that sent a shiver down my spine.
My mouth opened to say something, only to catch myself as another sound actually did fill the air. It was the door of the bowling alley opening, as someone came out. We all spun that way, only to see some random guy coming into view. There didn’t appear to be anything special or unique about him. He just looked like some teenage guy with dark red hair that was cut short, a levi jacket over a flannel shirt, and jeans. Absolutely nothing stood out about him. Except for the fact that he looked very vaguely familiar for some reason. But I definitely didn’t know him, unless he was just some random boy I’d seen around school back before I went to Crossroads. And why would some random boy be here right now? No, this wasn’t just a nobody, and we weren’t really in Laramie Falls. We were still in the tower, which meant that the boy coming through that door and walking across the parking lot toward us could only be one thing.
Cerberus and Eurso gave low growls as the figure came closer, but I put my hands out to stop them. Attacking the creature wouldn’t help or accomplish anything at all. And I didn’t particularly feel like watching the two of them get torn apart. Keeping my hands out to calm them down, I exchanged a quick, knowing glance with Percy before turning back to the figure. He had stopped a few feet away and simply stared at us expectantly. I tried to speak once, but my throat was so dry nothing would come out. I had to swallow hard and try again. “Okay, so what do we call you, exactly?” I had many more questions than that, but it was probably best to start with something simple. Especially since it seemed like the creature wasn’t going to kill us immediately.
Looking into the seemingly normal teenage boy’s eyes was kind of a mistake in that moment. It was hard to explain, but I clearly wasn’t looking at a single set. They shifted, the pupils changing several times per second. I was looking at one person’s eyes, then another, and another. I saw more and more different people staring at me as the eyes changed so fast I couldn’t keep up with it. Sometimes the color and shape changed entirely, while other times it was simply a sense that there were different eyes looking out at me. It was disorienting as hell, to say the least. I felt something in my stomach and head both twist, trying to make sense of it and failing. There was one body in front of me, but the eyes were shifting between hundreds if not thousands of beings constantly, as though they all wanted to get a look at me.
Finally, the boy spoke, his tone strangely casual given everything that was going on and that little eye trick. “I believe you already had a name for this one. Douche Impatient?” He paused, head tilting sideways briefly. “Ah, no, Impatient Douche.”
Yeah, that definitely made me do a double-take, my eyes widening in surprise. That was why this guy was vaguely familiar. He was the jerk from that day at the bowling alley, the one who had bitched at me for not going through the door fast enough. He had called me Barbie and asked if the word ‘pull’ was too hard for me to read.
Taking all that in, I opened and shut my mouth a couple times. “Yo–you’re not really… Oh God, please tell me you’re only taking his form and this isn’t yet another example of some astonishingly powerful figure hanging around my hometown to watch me.”
Those eyes shifted through another several hundred forms, all of which seemed faintly amused. “We have adopted this form from your memory, Final One. It suited our purposes as one antagonistic toward you, yet not an enemy. Unless you choose to be, of course.”
It was strange, he didn’t actually say those words. Not in a normal way, at least. Instead, all he actually physically said was, “Explanation.” That’s all that came out of his mouth. And yet, following that single word, my mind was filled in with the memory of him saying all that other stuff. But he didn’t. They didn’t, whatever. They absolutely had not said those words, they just filled my memory in as though they had. It was like they could completely skip over the actual, physical act of speaking and just make me remember things they wanted to have said. Yeah, it was weird, and wasn’t helping the twisting, uncertain sensation in my brain. This whole situation was just… strange.
Shaking that off as well as I could, I took another breath before forcing myself to respond. “I definitely don’t want to be your enemy. But why are you calling me Final One? And what about the others?” I glanced back toward Percy, Cerberus, and Eurso, only to find them completely frozen, motionless like they had been time-stopped.
“They are inconsequential,” replied the figure in front of me. “You are the Final One, our final barrier, the one who will release us so we may complete our most holy task.”
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
But yet again, the only thing he actually physically said was, “You.” That single word carried with it something that adjusted my brain so I thought I remembered the rest of that whole spiel. That was just how these entities communicated, apparently. They said a single word that subsequently made people ‘remember’ the rest of what they wanted to say. It was like they could package all the information they wanted to convey within that one word. That was just–it was–yeah, hard to get used to. And part of me was really hoping I wouldn’t get the chance to become accustomed to it. Something about this figure really unnerved me, beyond the whole eye thing, the way they communicated, and the fact that they appeared as some random guy from my memories.
Trying not to think about all that, or about the way Percy and the other two were frozen, I focused. I had to talk to these creatures. Bastet, Gaia, and Laein were all working on the magic side of this. I still wasn’t sure exactly what sort of spell they had to put together, or what it entailed. But they were doing their part. I had to do mine. “This holy task you’re talking about, that’s the thing where you want to kill every living being in the universe?”
The figure in front of me shook their head. out loud, they simply said, “No.” But my brain was immediately filled in with a much longer explanation.
“This is why we wished to explain the truth. You are operating under the false assumption that we are no different than these Fomorians you have struggled against. In truth, we are nothing alike. Were we to physically conflict, there would be no struggle. You would cease to be separate and would become part of us. Such an outcome would be entirely inevitable. That is a certainty, not a threat.
“But that leads to the underlying philosophical difference between those creatures and us. They wish to eliminate all other life, destroy it permanently. We, on the other hand, wish to extend and immortalize all life. We are not destroying, we are preserving. Any life we take within ourselves becomes eternal. The struggles of every living being throughout all existence will be eliminated. No one will ever suffer or fail again. We will be one being with trillions of lives within us. There will be no more fighting, no more suffering, no more wanting. Come, and see what we have prepared for you.”
Just as the figure filled my mind with all that and I managed to process it, they changed. They didn’t look like Impatient Douche anymore. Instead, they looked like my father, though the eyes continued to constantly change. Seeing my dad’s face, not only in this context, but after the past couple months of being away from him, made me stagger a bit. My fist clenched even tighter, and I had to consciously stop myself from lashing out. This wasn’t real, it wasn’t really my dad. They hadn’t killed him, he was back in the present day, and these things were still trapped in this tower. They were just showing me what they wanted to do.
Even then, it was all I could do to keep myself under control. My voice still shook a little bit. “That’s why you brought me to some facsimile of my old town? You’re going to show me all the people from my childhood or something? That’s why there’s no other people here, isn’t it? Because in this scenario or whatever it is, you took all of them. You took all the people, all the birds, the cats and dogs, you took everything. And now you’re going to tell me how this is actually a good thing.”
My father’s body with thousands of shifting eyes, some of which I thought I recognized now as belonging to teachers and classmates, regarded me in silence for a moment. Then they simply turned and began to walk away. Left with no other choice, I gave Percy and the other two a quick, hopeless glance before following after. I had to hope that they’d be okay once we got through this.
Or we wouldn’t get through it, and it wouldn’t matter.
The figure walked ahead of me, shifting several more times through the bodies of people I knew. Some better than others. They were all figures I had grown up with and seen around town. We walked all the way to the police station, which just reminded me of the last time I had been there, when I’d gone to stop Ammon, and ended up meeting Fossor.
Yeah, what pleasant memories those were.
But when we went inside, it didn’t look like it had at that point. Instead, it looked like I remembered from when my mother had worked there. From when she had been the sheriff. We walked straight to her office, even as a feeling of dread went through me. Having this creature or creatures appear as my dad was bad enough, but if they shifted into my mother from those days, I wasn’t sure what I would do.
But the figure simply became Scott instead. Which still wasn’t great, and reminded me of someone else I hadn’t seen in a long time. Too long at this point.
The fake Scott dropped into Mom’s old seat and rotated to face me with their feet on the desk. Once again, they spoke a single word that contained many more. “Truth.
“You have seen firsthand in so many ways, how harmful competition and individuality is. Predator attacks prey. Those with strength and few morals make others they deem lesser suffer. The one you call Fossor harmed so many. He tortured and killed and destroyed. He is but one example. Countless others exist across all reality. We seek to eliminate those figures. We seek to eliminate all suffering entirely.”
Suddenly, we weren’t in my mother’s old office anymore. We were standing in the middle of a battlefield from the first world war. I saw mutilated and dying soldiers all around us, heard gunfire and explosions. And, more painfully, crying. I heard dying people crying out to be saved, or just to die. A man who was little more than a torso and head, his limbs mangled beyond all repair, lay in a crater begging anyone to please kill him.
Another flash, and we were in an alley where several horrifically thin figures were eating garbage out of a dumpster, while another lay nearby doing his best to jam a dirty needle in his arm.
Another flash, and we were at a big party of some kind, a ballroom full of rich, happy couples dancing the night away while barely paying attention to the massive array of food that was laid out on nearby tables. Food that would barely be touched before most likely being tossed out.
More flashes came in rapid succession. I saw more battlefields, more homeless people, children in Third World countries along with the bureaucrats who ignored them. I saw the dead, the dying, the spoiled, the suffering, and those who took advantage. I saw every possible angle of humanity. The figure in front of me was making certain that I saw everything bad and every type of person who took advantage of those bad things.
It was over in an instant, if it had ever even started. I wasn’t actually certain that we had even gone anywhere or done anything. It seemed just as likely that the creature had simply filled my mind with the memory of having seen all that. At this point, was there really any difference at all?
“Yeah, I get it,” I snapped once I was looking at Scott’s face with those rapidly shifting eyes once more. “A lot of people are suffering and they need help. And other people have way too much and don’t give a shit about sharing it. You’re not showing me anything new or anything I haven’t thought about before.”
The single word, “Solution,” came, followed by the memory of many more.
“When we are all joined, when all beings have been taken into ourselves, there will be no more wanting, no more suffering. There will be no fighting, only contentment, only bliss. We will be but one form. One form to enjoy all of reality. Children will spend eternity knowing their parents and never knowing pain. Every being who has ever lived and can be brought into our collective will be together forever, a life of eternal contentment that would never be matched by any other. You see this as death, when it is not. Every being who is a part of us exists within ourselves and may interact with one another in ways beyond your comprehension. Though we may be one physical body, we are, as that thought-holy book states, legion. We take away all pain, and provide joy and acceptance. Families, friends, even those who would never have met come together as one. We are family.”
Again, there was a hard, dry lump in my throat as I shook my head. “Look, maybe you think you have good intentions. Though I’m sure some of you don’t. Whatever, the point is, you’re wrong. You can’t just take every living being in the universe, shove them in one body, and say you’ve eliminated all pain and suffering. Maybe you’ve created facsimiles of their minds, taking their memories so you can create personalities in yourself or something, I don’t know. What I do know is that it doesn’t work like that. This–all of this is about more than just forcing everyone to get along by putting all their minds into one body. Life is more than that.”
Those rapidly shifting eyes regarded me as the body changed to the last one I wanted to see. My mother sat in that chair, staring at me with the eyes of thousands of strangers. “Question.” A single word followed by the full query.
“In that case, you should tell us your own truth. What is the meaning of life?”