Chapter 76
Missing Paths/The road not taken
3.33 AM. March 20, 2012.
Somewhere in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The hurricane storm was punishing the black military cargo plane, as if it was trying to destroy it. The lightning drew flashing veins in the clouds and some lightning struck the fuselage of the plane that, despite its enormous size, looked like a small bird flapping its wings in the middle of a squall.
The pilot maneuvered the plane with cold blood, even though he had never seen a storm like that in all his life doing illegal trips across the Atlantic. He knew those parts as well as the back of his hands and had his share of witnessing how the weather could change on the open sea. At the same time he had his share of seeing unusual phenomena, but he could not deny that the storm was very different from others he had seen.
He was flying just at the height he had been told to fly, which was at the same time the most dangerous because it was the core of that storm and also where the strangest phenomena was happening.
The clouds were behaving strangely, forming vortices and small spherical whirlpools around nothing. Those whirlpools were sometimes small, reaching no more than a couple of meters in length and breaking up in seconds, while others measured more than twenty meters or more. Every time the plane passed through one of them there was a vacuum of altitude that caused them to lose altitude for a few seconds. But after a few minutes the pilot got used to the strange phenomena.
On the other hand, it was not as if that storm was the only strange thing. The people he was carrying were strange too.
The pilot sighed and snorted.
He knew his only mission was to maintain stability. A small price to pay considering what those in the cargo compartment were doing.
[We're in the right spot!] A woman's voice came through the loudspeaker in the cockpit.
“So we made it,” sighed the pilot.
***
Gabrielle Tonelli, wearing a warm overall and with her hair tied in a bun, smiled nervously in her seat in the cargo hold and continued typing on her laptop as she checked the readings of the old prediction program she was using. She had warned the pilot that they were on target.
It had been years since she was that girl who had graduated from the faculty of economics in Rome, where she had received a degree in general physics and a doctorate in economics.
After leaving the university, she had no trouble getting a job with a good salary that allowed her to live comfortably.
That would have been her dream life had it not been for something that had disrupted her perfect life.
She had fallen in love.
A love that had been reciprocated, and then taken away from her in a murder only two years before.
Since then she had tried to search for clues as to what had happened and who might be behind it. All her research led her to discover that there were two groups. One of which, called Octogonus, had also been the culprit of one of the biggest terrorist events of the early 21st century. The attack on New York's Financial District and the Pentagon.
It came as a surprise to Gabrielle to discover that she was not alone in her search. Her research had led her to where she was now.
Minutes away from stopping the end of the world.
She knew what was going to happen, but she accepted it. If they were lucky nothing would happen.
No. Rather, they would be lucky. That was what that entity called Azusa had said.
“Everything okay?”
Gabrielle looked over her shoulder and there she found the shadowy face of the one who would be one of the protagonists that night. He was completely naked, but she had gotten used to it, after all clothes he destroyed very easily and in the current situation they were unnecessary. He was a young looking fey man, tall and toned, although quite thin. She had known him for a year and he had been a good friend of her lover.
His name was Shin.
She nodded. “I just warned the pilot.”
Shin patted her shoulder and nodded. “I guess here we go,” he said and started to walk away toward the rear cargo bay.
“Hey!” Gabrielle called out to him and Shin turned and looked at her. “Good luck,” she said with a weak smile.
“Thanks,” he nodded and walked away with the same serious face. He passed through a glass door that sealed off that part of the cellar and walked away.
The truth was that Gabrielle had never seen him smile before. Shin was a man of few words. When they weren't on a mission what he did most was smoke like a chimney and drink, although he didn't seem to be able to get drunk.
She didn't know much about him but one thing was clear to her.
Shin hated the so-called Octogonus group and the Cult of Star Worshippers more than she did.
They had taken everything from him.
***
Shin walked through the cargo hold and came to the seat on the side, where a man stood with a serious and thoughtful expression.
The man stood with his elbows on his knees and his hands on his chin.
“Let's go. The time has come, reporter,” Shin said.
The man with short blond hair looked up, revealing blue eyes behind glasses. He wore a strange, almost armor-like suit, which projected reflections of the environment at every movement and sounds of clanking glass. The suit was completely molded to his body revealing a muscular physiognomy. It almost looked like he was wearing a full suit of diamond armor.
The man stood up, he was a little shorter than Shin, but stockier. He sighed nervously and nodded. At that moment a mask of the same material covered his face completely and then extended over the rest of his head forming a helmet.
“Aren't you going to take off your glasses?”
Another voice boomed in the hold even though they were the only ones there. “It's not necessary. On the other hand he'll need them. The armor only lasts a second. Just long enough for the distortion and for him to reach his destination.”
“I see.” From Shin's body sprouted black particles that in a matter of less than three seconds formed his armor around his body.
They both walked to the loading ramp part and opened the hatch.
The man turned around and looked at Shin.
https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/42dd80f9-5ac6-42d5-8ccc-bcea020b6152/digx4s1-5c5c0278-941d-4a1c-9c04-ed0d23e718fa.jpg/v1/fit/w_828,h_1172,q_70,strp/nevermore_enygma_vol_5_chapter_76_by_hasegawakein_digx4s1-414w-2x.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MTY4NCIsInBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzQyZGQ4MGY5LTVhYzYtNDJkNS04Y2NjLWJjZWEwMjBiNjE1MlwvZGlneDRzMS01YzVjMDI3OC05NDFkLTRhMWMtOWMwNC1lZDBkMjNlNzE4ZmEuanBnIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTExOTAifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ.DPIOdpYWfTeOGH5uU47xyDjPDSKk8D7wez2jmCalhJw [https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/42dd80f9-5ac6-42d5-8ccc-bcea020b6152/digx4s1-5c5c0278-941d-4a1c-9c04-ed0d23e718fa.jpg/v1/fit/w_828,h_1172,q_70,strp/nevermore_enygma_vol_5_chapter_76_by_hasegawakein_digx4s1-414w-2x.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MTY4NCIsInBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzQyZGQ4MGY5LTVhYzYtNDJkNS04Y2NjLWJjZWEwMjBiNjE1MlwvZGlneDRzMS01YzVjMDI3OC05NDFkLTRhMWMtOWMwNC1lZDBkMjNlNzE4ZmEuanBnIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTExOTAifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ.DPIOdpYWfTeOGH5uU47xyDjPDSKk8D7wez2jmCalhJw]
“What's wrong?”
The reporter held out a hand. “I just wanted to say thanks again. For everything.”
Shin looked at him seriously, but accepted the greeting. “I hope you can be reunited with your daughter.”
The cargo hatch finished opening and they could see the strange scene at the tail of the plane. Those vortices were multiplying.
“Azusa, are you ready?”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
There was no answer but to the question a crystalline entity began to materialize, floating behind their backs. It was barely a meter long by half a meter high. Its body was composed of a sphere inside what looked like a rhomboidal structure. It had appendages sprouting from each side of the rhomboidal part that moved in a fractal pattern but at the same time almost gave it the appearance of wings.
“So tiny,” Shin said.
“Do you want me to destroy the plane to make myself bigger? Remember that I could lock the Solar System inside me,” Azusa said in a voice that didn't reveal the slightest bit of emotion.
“Yeah, well. I'll believe it when I see it,” Shin replied, turning to look at her.
“You won't. That's the point.”
“It's going to work, isn't it?” asked the other man.
“Yes,” replied Azusa. “But remember only you will have memories of what happened. But most likely the last two or three years will disappear from your memories. You won't remember anything that happened here.”
“Yes, you have repeated it ad nauseam,” Shin pointed out.
“I must repeat it because it is important. In your case, William, you will not remember your time helping, nor all that we have gone through to regain the knowledge to send you back in time.”
“Don't remind me that,” Shin repeated, looking out into the storm.
“You won't. That's the point.” Azusa continued. “You will only remember that you lost your daughter and your quest through these years. What you have to go through will only be part of your story.”
William nodded. “Luckily I found the clues before all this mess so there shouldn't be a problem.”
“You have to understand that the armor will be the link to a fragment of me in the past, an anchor in time, but I will no longer be able to help you. The rest is up to you. You will not be able to return to this time.”
“I know.”
Azusa turned to Shin. “And your case will only be your conscience. You will have the memories of what you lost, but you will be the only one who remembers it.”
“A path not taken.”
“Exactly,” Azusa replied.
“Well, at least I know what I'll have to do and stay away from hurting anyone.”
“You're wrong.”
Shin frowned. “Do you think I'll make the same mistakes?”
Azusa didn't answer for a few seconds and then spoke. “Freedom exists for those who move in a linear path. In case you could understand time in a dimension where everything happens at the same time, it doesn't matter the point because past, present and future happen at the same time. In that case you just have to live your life in a way that if you repeat it you feel proud to repeat it in an infinite loop.”
“It's a contradiction.”
“No. It can also be a call to life. If you live in a unique way you lose the fear of death, even. Freedom for entities like you is in personal linearity. Even for someone who can observe the future it is the decision that leads to that future becoming a reality or being avoided. Maybe on the universal scale our fights don't matter, but they are what give meaning to existence.”
“What do you want to tell me?”
“You two have been given the opportunity to make things right. To complete and regain what has been taken from you. Don't make the stupidity of refusing to be happy. Even when they died you gave them happiness until the last moment. You may not be afraid of your death, but that doesn't mean that now you should be afraid of being happy.”
“For an entity of pure logic and millions of years old you sound sentimental.”
“Someone like you has no right to say that to me. Perhaps that is the ultimate point of my species, to achieve some emotion beyond moving consciousnesses across planets and eras. Knowledge without emotional experience is empty as well.”
Shin turned and squinted at her.
“I'm not going to remember any of this, am I? Can you answer me something?”
“I'll try, if I know.”
“Are you sure you don't know anything about my species?”
“No. But the anthropomorphic form of humans was part of our project of Evolutionary Projection. Only one version, we didn't manipulate all the parameters when we seeded more life on this planet.”
Shin and William looked at each other and shook their heads.
“The gods are nuts,” Shin said.
“I am not your god. Wherever you come from, I can only say that you are much older than you look. Most likely you have wiped your mind by crossing here as a system to keep your sanity. There are worse things than death in the spaces beyond this universe. But it is true that in Pnakotus we had some references of those who saved us and they had what is called anthropomorphic form. The iteration in the design in the evolutionary projection was simply a tribute to those who saved us, nothing more than that. But I don't know all the details, that happened billions of years before I was born and the elders erased much of the knowledge as a precautionary measure before moving the consciousnesses to Earth.”
Shin stood watching her in silence.
“Does that help you?” Azusa asked.
“Not much... I won't remember any of it anyway.”
“Not at the time you move, at least.”
Shin looked at the storm. “The shape is the most important thing…”
“What?” William asked.
“When I came to this universe that was the first thing that came to my mind. And in fact it has bothered me for some time to think about it. What is it about my form that looks so much like a human's? I've always been curious about that.”
“Those particles in your body can make you change your shape. I can't assure you that your current form was the original one.”
“That's why you need to get inside my head at the moment…”
“Exactly.”
“Still, if you discover something important you can't tell me and I won't even be able to remember it if you could.”
“Exactly. You have to understand that those particles in your body are a double-edged sword. That's why you must use them now to destroy the anomaly and send your consciousness through them. What concerns me most is that you have no pathways that I can observe. You are not bound by the rules of this universe. Yes you can move your consciousness but I have no idea what can happen to your body on this line if it is erased.”
“You were saying about matter in balance.”
“Yes, but frankly I doubt the universe cares about a few pounds of exogenous matter from another universe.”
The group was silent for a few seconds as the storm seemed to be increasing in fury. A vortex had just formed at the bottom of the plane's tail that must have been over a kilometer in diameter.
“Here it comes,” Azusa said.
Above the vortex the clouds had begun to swirl into a spherical shape.
They couldn't see his face, but they could hear William's breathing sounding heavy through his helmet. He looked back. Gabrielle had risen from her seat and was looking up with her hands pressed against the glass that protected her. William and Shin raised their hands in greeting and could see that she had a worried look on her face.
William walked down the ramp and looked up at the spherical whirlpool.
An opaque sphere of a color darker than black was emerging from the swirling clouds above the vortex. Within seconds it was growing larger and larger. In just a moment it must have been at least ten meters in diameter.
“Lord, grant me serenity to accept all that I cannot change, courage to change what I am able to change, and wisdom to understand the difference,” William said quietly. Then he looked at Shin and Azusa for a few seconds and nodded. “Good luck,” he said and jumped off the ramp and headed for the sphere. A cloud at that moment passed underneath and when it cleared William had disappeared.
He was gone.
“Our turn,” Azusa said.
Shin walked to the edge of the ramp and jumped.
Azusa stood on his back and from her sphere inside the rhombus sprouted a crystal that penetrated Shin's skull
Shin was dying at that moment, but before his brain and the particles could set the regeneration in motion the particles came out of his body and headed towards the sphere.
Out of the corner of his eye Shin could only see how the particles of his armor were growing in size and how several of them took the shape of blades.
Death reached him and he could see no more. Everything went black.
***
March 22.Thursday. 125 S.A.
Shin woke up. The armor was still active.
He remembered.
The memories he had lost had returned.
He could understand everything that had happened.
He understood.
He had met Azusa in a timeline that no longer existed. That was the reason he had memories of something that had never happened. It was the reason he had tried to get away from Mai and Lizbeth, only for time to put them back on the same path together.
Azusa had used her body to stop the fractus invasion once, before the spatial distortion that allowed entry to Earth was fully opened.
But that had been reset. It had never happened. The invasion had occurred in 2094.
His consciousness had returned to 1998 and had moved away from both of them so that they would be safe, while he dedicated himself to finding who would be responsible for activating the spell that in 2012 would produce the invasion.
He had hunted down those responsible for the cult and that terrorist group. But that had not happened as it should have.
In 1999 he had disappeared. Some of the terrorist cells were still active and had completed a series of terrible attacks at the beginning of the 21st century.
But Mai and Lizbeth were alive. And at the same time the puzzle was almost complete.
Now he understood why he had never remembered that last part. At first it had all been like a dream. But it wasn't. It had been real.
The reporter he had never met was real. Only him. Shin had searched for him only to find that he had been missing since 1997.
He had never been found. But there was no daughter. There was no data to speak of any daughter.
But Shin in his memories of that time that had been erased remembered meeting William in 2008. He had seen pictures of the girl and newspaper clippings that William himself had kept in his research notebook.
William. The nosy reporter specializing in crime chronicles, even though his appearance made him look a bit giddy. When Alice had disappeared he was investigating a cult in Texas and had always thought they had been the culprits.
The 16-year-old teenager had disappeared in 1997 in Texas and had appeared in several newspapers.
But that had only happened in the time that no longer existed.
In the new timeline only the father was the one who had joined the list of missing persons.
Something was wrong, but those phrases pronounced by Svetlana were the same ones that the girl who had saved him had said to him. It must have been Alice.
What did Azusa know then? If time had reset, did that mean she wouldn't know?
What would she tell Mai about it?
Suddenly images assaulted him.
“You'll be fine. You just need to heal your wounds.”
“I want to sleep forever. Leave me here, please.”
That was a 2011 memory of time erased. Shin thought about it for a moment. Ah, shit, he thought. I'd forgotten about that.
He had a new problem, but first he'd have to fix what was on top of him. He had to get out of there. He was crushed by several tons of dirt and concrete from the tunnel where he had been fighting with the woman in that white symbiont armor. He didn't have much oxygen inside his backpack. But on the other side he had grenades. Maybe he could with the explosion stir the earth enough to in the space of a moment set off the armor particles to make it go up as if it were a molecular vibration hammer. Of course he hoped it would work, but there was also the possibility that the opposite was true.
“That damned woman. When I find her she won't get away,” Shin said angrily, thinking of the pink-haired girl in her white armor.
In his mind he had to help Stuart to go towards the targets. He didn't know what had just happened a couple of minutes ago.