Escape attempt 578
The change had been slow at first.
Slight ripples in the blanket that covered reality.
To any other, it would’ve gone completely unnoticed. James spent more than a hundred Loops repeating the same mindless slaughter on different Sparks, over and over again, before he felt it. Those few minutes at the end of the Loop stretched into hours of mindless slaughter. There were Sparks he wouldn’t kill. Anyone under eighteen. Anyone who had done him good in the past. Anyone who could give him a reason not to.
But the rest of them. The countless thousands of strangers cursed by the system. He killed them.
All of them. Over and over.
The looper had no clue if he needed different Sparks or just the same ones over and over, so for the entirety of the first hundred slaughters, he experimented. What James found, intrigued him. No Spark was the same, was the first thing he belatedly realised. The more he felt his own Spark devouring others, the more he was sure that each was different.
And it wasn’t just the innate quality, it was also the quantity. Some people’s Sparks felt like a gentle breeze, while Nicholas’s in particular had felt like a hurricane of power. Each kill made the looper more intimate with his Spark, and by the fiftieth hunt, he was sure something was happening.
In the same way, the Loop failed to reset properly anymore, simply snapping him into his bedroom, it also failed to reset his Spark. Most of the power he gathered in those few precious minutes was stolen by the reset.
But some of it wasn’t. Small embers.
And those small embers only got hotter and hotter as he relentlessly gathered Sparks.
“I can feel it,” James confirmed on his eightieth Loop, hands bloody after claiming another Spark. “It’s growing brighter, and the Loop can’t stop it.”
“The effect is compounding,” Fig confirmed. “Every time you complete your hunt, not only does the Loop fail to completely wipe the stolen Sparks away, but its ability to do so degrades as the leftover embers grow.”
The fire grew. Each night James delved into his bloody work with reluctant drive. He had killed hundreds already by the fiftieth Loop. Broken into homes and slaughters couples and families alike. Hunted people down streets and sliced their guts open or broke their necks. Every night he was tainted with blood.
But the embers were a snowball, and every night he grew more sure that stopping would cause the whole thing to fall apart. He had to keep going. Keep piling bodies onto the fire.
The Loop existed in perfect harmony. James knew that. It was instinctually burrowed into his soul. Every part of it had to be complete or else none of it was. A fortress of dominos that was unbreakable from the outside, but with enough of a push from James, could come crashing down.
He just needed to break one part of the Loop and the rest would crumble. A road bump to stop the snake from eating itself in an endless cycle. James worked tirelessly without proof to say the slaughter had meaning besides his growing Spark, then on the one hundredth and twenty-sixth morning after he’d begun.
Something changed.
There must’ve been a thousand small, imperceptible changes in the Loop before James finally caused one he noticed. But when the Loop finally caught his attention, it caught the whole world's attention as well.
Street signs disappeared. Well, not the physical signs. But the words and the directions just vanished. On the eve of a miraculous meteor shower, it sent the internet sprawling for answers. Hundreds of forums and news articles raving about the madness in the streets, all across the world stretching out with nuisance consequences.
“It’s working,” James said in awe, gazing up at the metal sign that used to say his street name. Now just empty. The Spark in his soul burned with a hum of fulfilment knowing its purpose was finally at work. His Spark was bright now, far brighter than any other human on earth.
“It will start giving you little wins, try to slowly dissuade you back to negligence” Fig explained. “But we won’t accept anything less than utter defeat.”
James agreed. He could feel the Loop waning. Tipping, if ever so slightly. A slight disruption in the perfect balance it required to be. So the looper pushed, and he pushed hoping to send the whole thing tumbling to the wayside.
Kill after to kill, Spark after Spark, skull after skull. All piled underneath him as he reached up to the Loop so he could tear it down. His actions would’ve haunted a younger James, but the looper remained untattered by the deeds he had to do.
Anything was better than the Loop. No matter the bodies it required. On his two hundredth hunt, James pondered if he was well and truly over the edge. The way he was now, was almost exactly what he feared he might unleash on the world. A monster whose value of life had been distorted to nothing by the Loop.
That was what he was.
Yet, for some reason, the doubt and anxiety James had once harboured couldn’t take hold of him. Every time it tried, Jake’s words reminded him of the truth.
It all had to go, no matter the cost. If it made him a monster, that was a sacrifice James was willing to make. Again and again.
Until it was done.
Insects were the next thing to go. That must’ve been close to the three-hundredth Loop. James was also pretty sure that a whole bunch of music, words and a vast majority of the internet’s dead space had been tossed out as the Loop tried and failed to correct itself.
Things spiralled from there.
First, it was badgers, then it was dogs, then it was kangaroos and racoons. Then all land animals disappeared. Fish were next, shortly followed by birds. By that point whole streets of Melbourne had collapsed out of existence, making the city much more of a maze than James was used to.
He turned on, even as the internet began to implode and the electricity just stopped working. Every Loop James hunted for Sparks. The fire in his couldn’t be tamed by the Loop anymore. It was too busy trying to put itself back together and failing horribly in the process. The looper was growing more and more driven in his task.
Every missing part of the Loop was a sign that he was winning.
Trees disappeared next. Then most of the car’s in Melbourne. People remained. Everything else was subject to being devoured by the Loop to buy it more time. The world quickly devolved into a mess. Riots in the streets as people's homes, appliances and clean water simply ceased to exist. Everything fell apart.
And once everything started falling apart, people started panicking. Which made it all the more annoying to track down Sparks. Luckily, the looper could recognise their faces and still was able to set to work. Whether it was hunting them into isolation in dark back alleys or killing them in broad daylight, the looper cared not. He simply did kill, and killed, and killed till violence felt like the only thing he was good for.
Then something wildly out of either James or Fig’s predictions happened.
The Loop did something new.
On his five hundredth and seventy-eighth Loop since deciding to escape, with a Spark inside him raging like an inferno. He didn’t wake in his bed as had been normal before the snap. He blinked the gory images of the past Loop out of his eyes and stared at…
“Why am I on the street?” James asked into the empty asphalt and concrete around him. He turned to survey the area around him but found nothing. There were no cars in the Loop anymore, nor trees or bikes or hedges. He was surrounded by a stark, unchanging road that looked odd in a way that made the looper’s skin crawl.
The buildings had the same oddness to them.
It was dark too, with the only lumination coming from the street lamps that repeated in the same odd…
James looked up, searching. A blank void of night greeted him. Only… the more he looked, the more the looper realised that there weren’t stars. Not a sparse few dots, not hard to see little specks in the sky.
None at all.
Just an inky darkness.
It’s not night. James realised, as an old tinging sensation he hadn’t felt in a long time started crawling up his spine. The sun’s gone. That wasn’t what was making cold sweat run down his spine. The looper was sure of it. This was something else. It was somewhere, but the looper couldn’t see it.
He spun on the spot readied in his martial stance. The looper’s eyes flicked from building to building. Street to street. His muscles tensed and his fists clenched in the empty silence.
The overwhelming silence.
The endless silence.
James stood in a intersection of four identical roads, with identical buildings. Each road stretched on longer than his mind could comprehend, stretching on into the endless darkness ahead, shining with the faint glow of streetlights in the distance.
This Loop had felt different since the moment he found himself standing in the empty street, but he hadn’t noticed how different.
The looper's breathing became unsteady, then it slowed, and then it stopped altogether. No dizziness came. No headache. No feeling of a need to pull for precious air. Then when the looper finally took another breath he became aware of another unsettling fact.
He wasn't breathing anything in. There was nothing to breathe in.
“Fig?” James asked into the darkness. It only echoed in the great silence.
Great silence. A silence that had made his heart beat faster and faster as he Spark quivered in the first ember of fear the looper had felt for a millennium.
When did a great beast go silent?
The Loop isn’t silent. James realised, and suddenly all the assurance time had stoked inside him didn’t feel so sure anymore.
Because the Loop wasn’t silent. The Loop was listening.
And the Loop wasn’t dark. The Loop was watching.
The feeling crawling at his back wasn’t just aimless. Here stranded in a maze of concrete and darkness, the Loop was observing him.
Many great scientists had felt great pride in their ability to observe reality.
James felt nothing but nausea as reality observed him.
That’s when he saw it. A light in the distance so bright the looper thought it might blind him. It burned in a colour James realised he couldn’t describe because he couldn’t comprehend it, and it looked like a sun. Except brighter. So bright he knew standing any closer to it would burn him to dust, yet when he took a step towards it, he felt no warmth.
It was so far away in the distance. Not a distance. The distance.
What the hell is going on? James wondered sincerely as he gazed at the fire that was ten thousand miles away and yet a single step at the same time. The looper felt drawn to it, in this concrete prison. He felt like he knew the way, even when the way didn’t make sense to him. He felt he needed to take a step towards it.
That he must.
Something wanted to stop him. The world wanted to stop him. It was a strange feeling to watch the concrete mirage the Loop made curve into a civil horror of Stoney's hands and feel the asphalt try to consume him.
He felt his feet devoured by the road as a maw of it opened to swallow him his bones crushed as the concrete building turned into mighty hands that slammed him past.
Yet still, the fire on the horizon was only a step away.
So James took it.
The moment he touched the light, James felt the concrete that crushed him and the asphalt that devoured him burn away. He saw the light touch his soul and realised that was all he was, and then James felt it spread through him like fire. He had been so confused. So unsure. But he touched the light anyway.
And now he knew why.
The maze of silence and darkness hadn’t been a maze at all. It was death throws. And the fire he touched, was his Spark, that had grown so big it engulfed the very sun. It had engulfed everything. And now, it had engulfed James too.
He could feel himself burning in its heart. He felt the Loop burning on its edges as it extended out from him and devoured it all in one great inferno. James felt… he wasn’t sure. He didn’t feel pain. He didn’t feel joy. He didn’t feel imprisoned or free. The sun didn’t feel any way about burning. It just burned.
So James just burned.
And the Loop burned with him.
******************
Last Loop
“You’ve been a real pain in my ass, you know that?” A voice that sounded a little too much like his father said in annoyance.
James groaned and tried to shoo the annoying intruder away from his precious sleep, and was unceremoniously kicked out of it. He felt his body fall out of the bed and into a pile of laundry that was very familiar. The same pile Michael got kicked into so much. Without any grace, he ripped a stray pair of shorts off his face and blinked the sleep out of his eyes.
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When he finally got to open his eyes, James realised he was sitting in his room. His actual room. All the self-help books. The much too big cabinet. The bunk bed that he had sat on as he consulted with…
Don’t think about that now. James scolded himself. It had to be done. Even then the guilt remained, but James quelled it and looked onwards to the only other person in his bedroom. Probably the only other person in reality. To James, he appeared as Hugh when he felt darker emotions then morphed into Michael as he steadied them, before finally shaping into Jake as James felt the pride of winning take over him.
It had been a long-fought battle.
But he had done it. He had won.
The Jake that stood in front of him was not the Jake James knew. What appeared before him wasn’t even on the same calibre of existence as the human. He was something higher. Something grander. My interpretations of him changed when I looked because I couldn’t comprehend what he was. James thought to himself in a moment of understanding.
He knew what the being in front of him was. For it had created him. It was instinctually, the same way a child knew a father. The same way he had known…
The figure changed back to Hugh, and James hugged the nearest pillow for comfort as it began to talk. The pillow smelled of cinnamon.
“Out of all the creatures I’ve had the displeasure of serving, you are by far the worst in a long while.” The creature that looked like Hugh spoke. It had a cadence that befits his nature. Mechanical and lifeless, but somehow inviting. “You weren’t even fifteen minutes into integration and you caused a solar system-wide timeline collapse. That’s got to be a record.”
The figure stepped between the bunk bed and James, then leaned down to face him eye to eye. Where the rest of its body mimicked Hugh’s, its eyes betray its true nature. They were blank voids, filled to the brim with lines of swirling golden spellcraft of the highest magnitude.
“So.” It prompted. “What do you have to say for yourself, record holder?”
For a piercing moment, James felt the weight of existence that was greater than he ever would be as the full weight of the system and its earthy avatar weighed down on him. James tried to think of an answer. His brain scrambled for one that might appease the mighty creature before him.
“I’m s-sorry!” James sputtered out, and it sounded like more of a cry than a response.
Still, the mighty avatar receded at his answer. It made a sound like a sigh as which surprised James because he hadn’t thought the system could sigh.
“It’s not your fault.” The avatar admitted. “It literally can’t be. From the records I have here, you died before your death. Which might not make sense to you, but it’s fairly common for timeline breakdowns.”
“Before my death?” James questioned. Instead of answering him, the avatar looked up and seemed to notice something.
“We’ve met the quota.”
“What quota?” James questioned, again, truly hoping for at least one answer.
“You’re planet’s integration contract states that extraterrestrial Aspect of any nature, be thy god, or the system itself, cannot initiate contact in a soul space without first offering comfort.” The avatar stated, gesturing to the room around him as he enunciated comfort. The avatar waved his hand and the world around the two of them fell away.
James barely blinked and suddenly, he was sitting at one side of a very finely crafted desk that smelled like cinnamon too. Weirdly enough. The wood was light and the desk twisted in a way that made it look almost alive. The avatar was on the other side of the smallish desk, with what looked like a Starbucks coffee in one hand and a drink James didn’t recognise in the other.
The Avatar offered him the coffee and he accepted it with a gracious bow, staying on his very best behaviour. After coming so far, dying now would seem very silly. And James was not a silly person.
He sipped his coffee as he surveyed his new surroundings. He was in a library. That much was obvious by the stacking shelves, all built out of the same odd, almost alive wood. Endless books were stacked inside them. Skins of beast James could never even comprehend bound the books of this place together. He struggled to comprehend the magnitude of never-ending rows of bookshelves, mixed with lovely desks and cushions to sit on, so he didn’t try.
Instead, James looked up.
The roof was an encircled dome of glass that aimed towards the stars. And the stars it showed, along with something else. A ball of fire, like a sun, and yet burning beyond it. Pale white, almost ghostly, burning in a way that looked almost… violent.
A giant ring of metal encircled, perhaps stabilising the raging inferno far out above them in the reaches of space.
James' eyes lingered on the flames more than he would’ve liked.
He just couldn’t take his eyes off it.
The ball of fire… it felt like it wanted to eat him.
James shuddered and tore his eyes off it as cold sweat trailed down his back.
“Are you happy with the surroundings?” The avatar asked.
James' mind lingered on the fiery ball of death above him, glowing in violent pale white, but nodded all the same. Anything to avoid upsetting the god-like being at any cost.
“You do realise I’m not the system right?”
“My apologies if I offended you by thinking as much,” James said immediately, hoping he hadn’t offended. “What are you then? If asking is not too much.”
“Archive.” The avatar- no, Archive said, in the same mechanical and lifeless voice. “Third Directive of the First, keeping of knowledge, both know and unknown to time. Were you hoping for an elder Directive?”
“No,” James said with a shake of his head. “I’m just happy to be alive.”
The last part sounded so good it almost made him giddy. He was alive. Finally. It felt so good to have worked so hard for something and then have it pay off so well. Archive nodded with the face of Jake, reflecting just how happy James truly was.
“A fortunate conclusion, to what no doubt must’ve been a traumatic year and two hundred and thirteen days,” Archive said, flashing a pane of glowing words in front of himself. They scrolled down a dizzyingly fast rate but James had no doubt the Directive took them in all the same.
It was ironic, considering how wrong the data was. A year and two hundred and thirteen days? Where had the Archive pulled that number from? It wasn’t anywhere near close to accurate in the slightest.
“How did you figure out how long I was trapped there?” James asked with genuine interest.
“Paradoxical time,” Archive said bluntly. “We possess the capacity to trace the amount of time that had passed on your soul and then equate it to the total passage in the local timeline distortion. The difference between your time, and the local timeline is one year, two hundred and thirteen days. Thus, is the amount of paradoxical time that exists in traces on your soul. Simpler put as the amount of additional time you experienced in comparison to your local timeline”
Then he added. “A compensation equivalent to your species lifespan perspective on that much time will be granted once details of the event are clarified.”
Compensation? What kind of compensation would the system- Archive, give him? James' mind was sent into a daze just thinking about it. There were many things he desired, but first and foremost.
“Can you move me to a different location on Earth as part of my compensation package?” James asked, he himself knowing that it sounded a little greedy. But it was something he needed. James knew that being surrounded by so much of the same wouldn’t do his mind any good. He needed to get away.
Archive summoned a book to the table. Empty and ready to be filled, along with a writing utensil. “We can discuss your compensation after clarification is given.”
James knew when not to push his luck, and this was one such time. But what clarification did Archive want? Considering how powerful he seemed to be, what clarification did he need? For some reason, he just couldn’t imagine a situation where he knew something Archive didn’t. Then again Archive didn’t say it wanted answers. It said clarification.
And James was happy to give it.
“Good,” Archive said, acknowledging his acceptance. “To your fullest knowledge and understanding, what were the key events that caused this specific anomaly to occur?”
“Death.”
“Whose’s death?”
“Mine,” James answered. “I killed an Invited Spark and had my Source moulded moments before my death. From my understanding, my Source, which was categorised to me as ‘Loop’ attached itself to the world or the day or time itself when it couldn’t attach to me.”
“Noted,” Archive confirmed. “That matches similar scenarios the emergency protocol derived. Next, to your fullest knowledge and understanding, were there any other participants or unexpected casualties caused by the Loop?”
This time James didn’t answer immediately. Because he wasn’t sure how to. What did participant mean? Were unexpected casualties considered those who died in the Loop? If so, that number would reach far higher then James had ever bothered to actually count. For a few precious moments of silence, he worried answering with anything would be the wrong answer in Archive’s eyes.
He conflicted, but on further thoughts, that conflict was silly. Archive meant had the Loop caused any death’s in the actual timeline and had there been anyone else involved in the Loop.
“None.” James answered, gripping his knuckles to his fist.
Archive stopped writing and gazed down on James with the face of Michael as his emotions boiled in a mix. Those glowing golden eyes lighty up a dark void bore deep into James’ soul.
“Noted.” Archive finally said, retuning to his writing. “A final question, then you shall be free to choose your compensation and we will return you to your original timeline. What did you do to cause that?”
Archive’s writing utensil left the book and reached up to the sky, pointing towards that giant inferno of white fire so far away from them yet still so ginormous.
“I don’t understand.” James blurted out.
“Clarify.” Archive requested robotically.
James pointed a finger towards the same inferno as the Directive. It shook slightly as James shuddered just looking at the white sun above them. “I didn’t do that. I have no idea what that is.”
Archive brows furrowed as he peered into James’ young grey eyes. So new to life. Then, the Directive clarified. “That is your Spark, is it not?”
James felt like he might fall out of his seat as Archive uttered those words. They felt evil. Poisioned. Like the universe was laughing at him. His Spark couldn’t be here. It had burned with the Loop.
Burned with…
No. James refused inwardly. He’s trying to bait me in. He must be. Archive’s playing the long con. He felt it in his bones that he had to be correct. There was simply no chance that his Spark could be here. It just couldn’t have happened.
Yet in the back of his mind, a small sliver of doubt slithered in.
“Perhaps a closer look will jog your memory,” Archive said when the silence had been left long enough to speak louder than any answer James could’ve given. With another wave of its hand, the Directive swiped their scenery away.
James blinked and then he was standing, instead of sitting. His bare feet rubbed against the strange metal surface that omitted a permanent chill into his being. He tried to reassess his bearing and realised he was standing on a long, impossibly large ring of metal that dwarfed the size of the library a thousand times over. It with filled to the brim with intricate lines, patterns, divots ports and all sorts of things that helped James to realise that it wasn’t just a ring.
It was a ship. Or a device at least, operated and manned. There were windows with a strange-looking film covering them where he could spot many different…
Are those aliens? Man-sized ones that had more bulk to their upper body than any human bodybuilder he’d ever seen. He tried, desperately tried to distract his mind with the thought of aliens. But he couldn’t.
For as grand of a scale as the ring-shaped ship encompassed, it fell short in comparison to the pale star inferno in front of them. A pure white inferno that twitched and boiled. Up close, he couldn’t feel any heat from it, but James knew that was because of the Directive to his side, shielding him from it.
The truth of the mattered showed itself in the spokes that held back the inferno from growing any bigger. Then extended from the inside of the ring ship and collapsed around the white star, keeping it still with a film of purple energy that radiated power.
And still, with all those spokes holding the thing down, James didn’t feel safe.
No for a second did he delude himself into thinking he was.
“This appeared the moment the timeloop resynced and the distortion ended.” Archive informed him. “Zenith was the first to deal with it, dealing with the intial fallout and securing the Spark before it could burn up earth. Then, I was passed the responsibility.”
Archive, who had been standing facing forward with it’s hands behind it’s back, turned to face James and gave him a genuinely inquisitive look.
“How did you achieve such a thing?” Archive asked.
“I don’t understand what you mean?” James asked, legitimately confused by the Directive’s question.
“The Spark we’re looking at, the one caused by your time distortion, isn’t just burning with potential.” Archive said, looking at the thing almost in reverence. “But with time. Paradoxical time same as that which marrs your soul, yet on a completely different level. Tens of thousands of years of it at least, filling that Spark with fuel to burn till every star goes dark. You see that flicker on black that licks the white?”
Archive pointed it out to James and indeed, he did notice what the Directive spoke of. On the very edges of the white flame, black tainted it’s purity. It looks almost like a creeping sickness trying to infect the pure mass of violent flame. Like an angle of good, slowly being corrupt by the vileness of sin and tempation.
“I see it.” James said.
“That’s potential. The outrim’s of it binding with part’s of your Source, which are both trying to exhaust each other and the paradoxical time. As you can see, they have found an equilibrium of sorts. None of the three flames strong enough to wholly consume the other.” Archive said. “And on top of it all, a piece of your Source seems to have bound itself to the heart of the flame.”
“My… Source?” James asked, voice quaking as he looked, searched and scoured the sight of the white sun for it’s heart. The single piece that brought that glorious flame together. Because the truth was that Archive was right. A piece of the Source know as Loop had broken off from the rest, refusing to burn as the rest of it did just…
“Just to let some monster escape.” James said under his breath, gazing into the center of the thing for any sign of what he feared. His words dripped with hate as he whispered. “You deserve to burn, you know it as well as I do.”
Then his heart, which had been thrumming his chest froze. He saw it.
At the center of the white sun, burning with flames of pure wrath was a small black dot. Like a pupil, watching him.
Judging.
James pulled all the will in his body to move but his body stayed frozen still, looped to the spot. His eyes stuck on the sight of his worst nightmare realised, and his mouth hung ajar in silent horror.
Archive looked on at him, confused at why the curiosity he pointed out had caused him such fear. Such mind-numbing, bone-chilling fear.
But he wouldn’t understand. No. In that moment, the universe offered a mercy to every being besides James by granting them ignorance of what atrocity lay in that white sun. That final Spark. Then, he felt it. A trickle of something that wasn’t his own trying to crack his head open like and egg and worm it’s way in.
A thought that came from his mind yet wasn’t his own.
An echo in his head, low and gravely, spoken in impossible tones to the point he felt his ears might explode.
I SEE YOU
Its words burrowed into his skull and tried to burn him from the inside. The Directive tried to come to his aide but he held his hand up, and directed the Archive to look at the white sun. The ball of pure white fire which had been inert only a moment ago, had begun violently clashing against its holding, reaching out flares and tendrils of brillant white towards James that burst through the shielding. The Archive said something about retreating but they never left where they stood on the ring ship.
James could hardly pay attention to the god-like being anymore. His attention solely focused on the tendrils- no, the arms of pure white fury that snatched and grabbed at him, burning and tearing the ship aparts as they tried to voraciously to devour him.
Then when the nightmare couldn’t get any worse. He saw it. Saw him. They had seen each other so many times before, but always on different sides of the same world. He, the prisoner, and James, the prison. But now, the prison and the prisoner were gone.
Now, it was simpler.
James was the prey and he was the predator. He watched him, pulled along by pure charcoal black hands claw his way out of the white sun, staring into James’ soul as he did so, howling and roaring in a tone that sounded like hellfire itself.
James collapsed to the ground of the metal ring. The Archive was still by his side but for some reason, he still felt condemned to his fate. All his plans. All his machinations and brilliant tricks. All washed away by that monster that pulled himself out of a sun just so he could devour James.
Any hope he had was washed away. Any dreams sank, as he watched the charcoal demon of pure pitch black escape the sun. Then he heard him, in his head, trying to break in again. This time it was worse.
This time, his voice had returned.
A voice that condemned him in the worst way possible.
By reminding him of what he wasn't, and what that made him.
YOU CAN'T RUN FIG
An imposter. A figment of a monster's imagination who had tried to play him for freedom. A jester who’d done his very best act.
And act that would end with his bitter demise.
Fig was sure of it, even as he was standing in a body of his own. A real body, next to a divine being that had created him.
As he met the timeless granite eyes of James Matthew Groves, burnt to the deepest black with hard, scaley charcoal skin, he was sure.
The looper would be his end.