Chapter Three
BREATHE… focus on the tip of your finger.
Feel the buzzing surrounding it.
Experiment with it. This is your world now so let's dive down into it. Go smaller by halves until this becomes the entirety of your existence, nothing else. It's not a quarter of an inch. It's an entire world and a Breath is now an hour. Focus your mind on you, send your focus so deep into your finger that the rest of you ceases to exist. You have an entire world to explore. Feel the energy in the air above you, as your new world makes its trip through the abyss. Around its sun it goes and back it comes. See its eddies, in the sky, swirling back up into space. See the waves of it crashing down. See them hitting the shield that seems to be projecting forth protecting your world. See the energy raining down through the cracks in the shield, falling down into the ground. Walk the path of your world, stop again at the wall that seems to be solid. Stopping your world, reversing its course and sending it back on its path, before it rebounds yet again.
Back to my mind. Take another BREATH.
Focus back down into the path, your whole world is rotating through this small path through space, this path that is a quarter of an inch long. Back and forth your planet is traveling, down the path of that quarter of an inch, all the while as you stare up into the lights flickering in the sky. Feel as your world makes its way, to and fro, in a system that would make any flat earther proud. Feel the energy, pressing down from the sky, trying to push you off of this plane you are moving on, it is your only sensation, ignore everything else for now. Let the feeling wash over you and try to understand it, that is your purpose now on this trip. This is your existence, time has no more meaning to you, leave that abstract concept behind. All that is here is your thoughts, this energy, and the little bit of your finger that you are bound up into. Go to where you are rebounding from, where your world hits this new universal boundary. Before bouncing back, try to feel how you are interacting with that impenetrable shield. How is it sending you back? Are you rebounding from it as it sends you back across the universe to its twin on the other side; or are you retreating from it, running to and fro in an effort to escape? Are you a rabbit bounding here and there, in an effort to escape? Or are you a wolf, sniffing out the secrets of this new universe you find yourself in, howling your challenge to the moon? Are you making any headway at all? Look at how it is locked down, see the frozen eddies in the sky. An interlocking formation that you are gliding through. Focus further into the energy between your world, and ignore the stagnant ice hanging above you. Focus more on the water your plane is floating on. Put to rest all the insanity of the globies, you have entered a new existence. Floating back and forth on a river, bouncing endlessly between the two ends of your new universe.
See the upcoming mountain, look on as it awaits you, reaching up until it combines with the sky. Move on the raft, that makes up your finger, feel every nuance as you bounce back and forth, up and down on these rapids. Reach up as you bounce higher, touching the stone ceiling above you. Touch the walls of the universe, feel what is holding you down, feel what is stopping you from reaching out as far as you want to. Feel the movement of you bouncing up and down, going this way and that way, as you travel back and forth endlessly. Try to measure these feelings, anticipate how the river will move under you. You have floated back and forth, a hundred times over through this endlessness, and yet every trip is different. Similar in the whole, yet every trip is different enough you still can't map the ups and downs, each one still a surprise to you.
Back and forth I continue to float, feeling the answer is close. Knowing it is on the tip of my mind, I don't rush it, I just wait for it to come to me. I just float up and down, moving back and forth between unmoving walls, with an equally still sky above them. Oceans moving up and down, crashing endlessly into unmoving mountains, slowly grinding them down. Imperceptibly on the scale of humans, but I am no longer living on that scale. If you drop back to the scale of a universe, it looks like they are melting, like ice in a glass on a warm summer day.
Time. The concept resonates in my mind, but that isn't the secret out of here. I see no way to turn back time until I am in my car, where I can drive back home, to avoid this frozen hell.
Time. Why is it still pulsing in my thoughts? What phrase had I read before, that my subconscious is screaming to me is the key to my freedom?
Time. Entropy’s arrow always points in one direction. That can't be it, unless it is telling me just to be patient and wait for the energy to end, unfreezing and melting those mountains back into the ocean.
Wait… that can't be right, mountains don't melt. Or do they. Technically everything has a melting point. Lava flows, Iron can drip down into the mold of a sword. Who’s to say what these mountains are even made up of? Early I had thought of them as Ice. Was my subconscious shouting at me to form a fire, melting down the mountains and adding them into the river I was floating on? No, that felt off, like I was moving away from what my mind is screaming out to me is the truth.
Look. Back towards the edge of your known universe, see the river flow into it, crashing into the wall. Look smaller, and follow the energy as it crashes down into the mountain. See, as it grinds the tiniest bit of it off. See how it floats down to the bottom. Wait, that's not it, it isn’t settling down on the oceans floor. Watch as the bits of mountain swirl back up again, hitting its apex of the water before it falls back down yet again, unwilling to settle into the ground. See it flow along the hard bottom, swirling around unwilling to rejoin what it has been separated from, swirling back up as it mixes into the water. See it swirl around before billowing back up once again, reaching towards the ceiling, and once again crashing back down in an endless cycle slowly breaking down and mixing ever more finely into the water.
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Time. Am I being told by my subconscious to wait? Am I supposed to float endlessly on this ocean, over and over, back and forth, as the mountains are slowly ground down to nothingness. Do I even have that long?
No! Go back to melting the mountains. At one point, you sent your will into the walls, and did something to form this never ending flow of water. Why is Time still ringing in my thoughts? You decided that is a dead end. Time only marches in one direction.
Time marches to the heat death of the known universe.
TIME’S ARROW!
ENTROPY
ORDER and CHAOS
Finally everything combines down into one coherent thought. Cascading into a eureka moment, each new realization flows onward into the next, as the concepts keep coalescing. Time marches forward, order becomes chaos, until eventually all of the universe will collapse. Collapsing into its heat death, as the last speck of order is converted into chaos. Somehow, right before I had been trapped in this amber, I had connected with that most basic concept. Somehow, on the smallest level, I had untwisted the least bit of Order that was locking a tiny piece of me into place. I had turned it into this wave of Chaos, which let my finger bounce back and forth between the walls of Order that I hadn't unlocked. Slowly grinding them down, as time passed by. Entropy in action, the walls lost bits of their Order, as it slowly unlocked into motes of Chaos. Following time’s arrow, entropy continued to grow. My path to freedom lay in finding my connection to the concept of Chaos and Entropy, breaking down the bonds that held me trapped in this place.
Slowly, I floated back out of the world I had brought myself down into. How long had I been stuck floating back and forth on that river? How many years had passed for my mind to begin to grasp the most basic of secret building blocks of the universe. Order and Chaos are the bases of so many books that you have read, both from western and eastern cultures, and yet going from knowing that to understanding that seems to have taken you lifetimes.
NO! Stop! Do not travel down that path. Regrets are human and to escape this order prison you must connect with chaos and entropy. Both concepts are fundamental truths of the universe, they know nothing of regret, as they move endlessly forward in time, never looking back. Focus back onto the river as it moves back and forth, endlessly trapped in Order, bouncing again and again, endlessly between the mountains. Entropy doesn't care, all will become water in the end.
Why does this still ring wrong to me? I am not meant to be trapped here, encased by Order. Chaos must march on… following time's arrow. Further connecting to that concept, my brain tries to continue gelling with that understanding.
Twitch, my finger moves again, down the river that has become my existence. This time it crashes forward into the mountain, consuming it as it drives forward, and now two knuckles are able to move an inch backwards. Into my body I return, as I catapult back out to observe my success. Looking down in my mind's eye, I see that they are able to move back and forth a couple of times. Then both my fingers seem to lose strength, without my focus down there, they go back to their frozen state, like the rest of its brethren.
BREATHE… Focus on your fingers again this time, connect back to entropy’s drive, and consume even more of the mountain holding you back. Continuing to progress forward as both of them move slowly, but more fully… Like a man at the bar, signaling he's ready for another round, two fingers pop up. Before once again, getting stuck back into the ballistic gel that has surrounded me, this glue that is maintaining the nightmare that my existence has turned into.
Another BREATH… again how long has it been on the outside? Five seconds, ten minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years… the human mind wasn't meant to be shut away like this. No wonder that little, yellow rat blew up the lab as soon as he got out…
No, ignore the thoughts holding you onto your humanity and go back to your connection to eternity and time's arrow. Another twitch and this time I feel my whole hand rotate, like an old man’s, telling you these are not the robots you are looking for. My fingers follow, one along the other, before exhausting themselves, and freezing back into the amber again.
BREATHE… In and out. Give yourself some time to remember their faces, before diving back into the endlessness that lets you connect with the Chaos. Use that memory to drive you forward. How long has it been now? Surely it's been years, what do they think happened to you? Was this the only ball to come down out of the sky? Was I the only one taken? Were they taken as well? The hamster starts running on his wheel again, twitchy, looking for his stash. Disjointed, my mind fracturing, as I bounced back and forth between the timelessness of chaos, and back out into my body, where I still remembered hugging my kids the weekend before. Sending them off to their mom's for the week, before coming on this march to hell.
I took another BREATH… forcing the hopped up little rat back into his slumber, and as I connected back with the timeless entropy. Marched even farther forward this time, my whole left arm moved. Up, like it was getting ready to catch a softball, thrown while playing catch with my daughter… Down, like I was getting ready to scoop my son up into a hug, before again freezing in its place, by my side. The errant thoughts, again kicked me back away from my connection. As my mind strove to maintain its humanity, while using such a primordial power.
BREATHE
In and out… Maybe Descartes had it right after all. Maybe my thoughts are proving all I need to know, to prove that I still exist. BREATHE in, and pray for the Courage to keep trying to understand this existence that I have been trapped in. Surely it's been centuries by now, do I have generations of great grandkids thinking the worst of me? Am I a cautionary legend, being told to new fathers? Warning them about the horrors that befall the children when their fathers abandon them. BREATHE out and pray for more of the Serenity that is keeping me going. Staying sane, in this black hell is the only hope I have left for, and that is clearly going to be a lost cause. Hope for sanity, and that someday, I will be let out of this hell. And when I am out, I will reign down a thousand fold of tortures on those who have captured me in this hell. I raged as my connection to chaos charged forth. BREATHE, and pray for the Wisdom to be able to pull off my revenge, on those whose power clearly dwarfs mine. Dwarfs it by so many levels of magnitude, that they are the sun to my pebble.
Breathe…Uh oh… that was a real breath…