Chapter 5 - Objectivity

He’d failed. It was one thing to die from his own stupidity, but he also got Ariane mixed up in the whole mess. If he hadn’t been in the library, had turned her away, or had simply checked out the book and returned to his room, Ariane would never have stayed there or even visited the library. From all these valid possibilities, he’d somehow fucked up everything perfectly to get both of them ensnared in this deathtrap.

If he had accepted the enlightenment on time, things could have been very different. Maybe he would have noticed everything before it took place by peeking at the laws and making better decisions. Or even better, it was possible he could outright ignore the deprivation as a subjective observer.

So many things he could have done differently, but he still couldn’t find a consistent logic that would have led him to make any of these decisions. Not just in hindsight, but even in the long term, the decisions he’d made were quite rational and grounded in solid reasoning.

If he had to pick something that could have led to a better outcome without violating his fundamental personality, it would’ve been not to have underestimated the message in the note.

The note clearly signified a limited time, but he had attributed that as a personal threat against himself from the stalkers, undermining the circumstantial information at hand.

The primary mistake, therefore, was misjudging the severity and context of the situation. It was actually quite foolish of him. Why would a world-shattering secret like subjectivity be shared with him unless it was deemed necessary? A set of miscalculations I probably can’t fix. Ever.

A simple estimation accounting for the locations of the fire’s sources and all the dry fuel in the library gave him despairing numbers. Fire would engulf every corner of the library in less than fifteen minutes.

This sensory deprivation had been going on for a while already, so seven or eight minutes at best before it would reach him and Ari near the center of the library. It is hopeless.

Suddenly, however, something changed. He failed to put his finger on it for a second, but then he felt it. Amid this numbing silence—an unsettling presence wormed within his psyche. The sensation crawled through his mind like an insect, asserting that he was no longer alone in his own thoughts. A disturbing dread washed over him, amplified by the nothingness.

Yet even that didn’t last for long. His surroundings seemed to change, and it was as if unknown formless entities caressed his body. Every instinct screamed at him to flee, but his body refused to obey. What the hell—

Then abruptly, all rest of the senses came rushing in.

An unidentifiable odor, rich and foul, assaulted his nostrils, pungent like rotting vegetation and something far more sinister. The scent was invasive, filling his lungs with each tremulous breath, a stark contrast against the sterile void he’d been trapped in. He made to wretch, but his body denied him even that simple relief.

An orchestra of disturbing sounds shattered the silence which oppressed him just a minute ago. Soft skittering noises echoed all around him, a symphony of tiny, unseen feet on a hard surface.

Occasionally, low, guttural growls punctuated these chilling noises permeating his very bones. It was a sound so primal and terrifying he felt a scream rise within him, one he couldn’t release.

His skin, which was barely perceptive not long ago, turned extremely sensitive. The charged air throbbed against it, and whenever the unseen entities brushed against him, his heart threatened to explode.

Intermingling with these were the faintest whispers, words indistinguishable and foreign, uttered in a voice that slithered in his ears. Their haunting timbre rose and fell in a rhythm that was almost hypnotic, each syllable seeming to gouge out the thoughts running through his head.

His inability to move only made it all the worse. Why could he feel all of it so vividly when his body was still petrified? He wasn’t one to believe in the supernatural, but this…? This was worse than a nightmare.

Something continued to worm its way into his thoughts, and the slightest of incongruency within them sent ripples of panic coursing through him. After all, his mind was supposed to be his greatest asset. If even that was snatched away, what was the point?

These macabre senses, so alien and yet so horrifyingly real, held him hostage. Each noise—even his own heart’s, amplified by his fear, transformed the world into a soundscape of terror.

And in the backdrop of this sensory onslaught, he was acutely aware of the horrifying promise. That opening his eyes would unveil a reality far more terrifying than the one painted by all his other senses combined.

It was a twisted invitation, even. He couldn’t control any of his limbs, yet his eyelids felt light as ever, awaiting his command to unveil a sight that was guaranteed to traumatize him forever.

So, he sat there, a prisoner in his own body. Unable to act, unable to escape, and far too terrified to dare look upon the unseen horror that lurked just beyond his eyelids.

The thought of what would happen if he allowed his sense of sight to join this macabre experience sent a deep, unsettling chill coursing through him.

This can’t go on! Forget opening his eyes; just the screeches and whispers were taking a toll on his mind. The moment he tried relaxing, his thoughts slurred, slipping away in an incoherent noise.

There was a maddening compulsion within these foreign thoughts. They instilled notions in his mind that he would generally never consider entertaining.

In one moment, they fostered in him a need to sway side to side. Another wanted him to shriek, while the next ingrained within him a desire to squeeze his hand out through his stomach. But it was all wrong. The impulses these thoughts infused in him were not meant for a human body. He just didn’t have the organs needed to fulfill any of these uncanny notions. Not that he was going to anyway.

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This can’t go on! I need to focus. A common denominator among all savants was their ability to isolate their thoughts.

Vern did precisely just that and brought up the diagram in an attempt to zone out his surroundings. His usual reflection of fundamentals wouldn’t give him any valuable insight in this situation. The diagram might.

It was usually a simple thing, but his mind kept going back to what brought about this situation. Why am I here? What is this place? His innate curiosity only led to even more questions that he dared not even ask. It went against all his notions of reality. So he had to focus.

The diagram. The lines. The rotting smell. The curves. The curves. The curves. The words. That thing he should see. The curves. The words. The words.

The diagram was a thing of immense complexity. It was one thing to look at it and comprehend its nuances but another to replicate the changes and further disseminate its intricacies.

The base concept seemed simple to him. Subjective observation allowed one to first recognize the possibilities of reality around them and then scrutinize them in a specific light. The diagram assisted in doing just that.

However, a mental model only gave him further insight into the nature of the diagram itself. He couldn’t simulate the feedback that the diagram was generating based on his thoughts. He was missing the crucial aspect of it.

Despite such being the case, he kept reminding himself of all the changes it held. He already knew that the diagram could facilitate enlightenment due to its innate subjective nature. But what did that say about the process of enlightenment itself? Didn’t that just mean that someone who’s used to living in a fake objective reality must realize the sham?

Then, by the extension of that logic, another method of enlightenment would be to observe something innately objective. But what exactly did objectivity entail when everything was subjective? Did something inherently objective even exist? What about that being outside?

Aghh!

The mere idea shattered his focus, and the entity beyond the eyelids occupied all his thoughts. The silence he’d cultivated ended up like the world holding its breath before a storm.

Just as his mind started to trick him into a false sense of relief, a chilling high-pitched shriek pierced the silence, bouncing off unseen walls to echo and seep into his consciousness a cruel reminder of his horrifying reality.

His heartbeat stopped in fearful anticipation of comeuppance, and his imagination conjured scenarios that threatened to devour his waning mental defenses. Yet nothing happened other than the omnipresent parasitic thoughts slurring his cognition further. As seconds ticked by, he slowly calmed down.

This was doable. The entity seemed not to care about him specifically, which actually made sense. He wasn’t the target, probably nothing more than some collateral damage in the grand scheme of this entity.

If he could just hold the perennial infiltration of these madness-inducing thoughts at bay. He had a chance.

A chance at enlightenment.

The plan took shape in his head in no time. He was sure that the real danger of the situation came from the infiltration of his psyche. His theory was that everything around him, including all the sounds and senses, were actually conjured by these mind-bending thoughts. If he could only keep them at bay, the process would be simplified.

So, it was back to the diagram. The lines. The curves. The curves. The curves. The words. His thoughts shifted from one to the next in a logically consistent fashion on their own.

His already thumping heart accelerated in anticipation and fear, yet the model of the diagram didn’t waver as his thoughts continued their cascade. When he felt detached enough from everything around him, he was ready.

Was it foolish? He didn’t know. Something had to change to survive the fire out there, assuming this horrorscape wasn’t the new reality. This was the necessary gamble to induce that deviation. To find objectiveness in this insanity. Summoning a courage born of desperation, he did it.

He opened his eyes.

For a fraction of a second, his vision flickered to life, and fog covered the terrain. Hundreds of tendrils dropped down from the sky, barely discernable in the fog only due to the red sheen reflecting off their writhing mass and unnatural curves. Silhouettes lurked in the fog, shaking with an eerie cadence.

Yet his eyes involuntary turned away from this alarming spectacle, pulled in a certain direction, and it registered.

Past the chaotic flurries of darkness towered a shadow. No, it wasn’t a mere shadow. It was an entity.

An entity that loomed even higher than the writhing appendages, standing in a sea of…blood? No, that didn’t seem right either. Three outlines extended out of the enormous entity, gripping the head of these appendages, their black mass shining with that red sheen.

Vern feasted his eyes upon this chilling sight—unable to tear them away. The appendages exploded into more tendrils, one of their two ends rushing towards the silhouettes within the fog, while the other—

Aghhhh!!

A sudden, searing pain exploded in his eyes, and he screamed. It was as if they had been subjected to unbearable pressure, a force too much for them to handle. His psyche, already teetering on the edge of oblivion, shattered into a thousand fragments, each with an inkling of the entity beyond, each more horrifying than the last.

There was no way to cope with what he’d seen, but his subconscious had done him good. Killed itself before it could process all that he’d seen. The entity was objective. Indeed, there couldn’t be more than one definition of such a thing.

The formless beings stopped whispering in his ears. All sounds and smells vanished, taking away the sickeningly pervasive thoughts with them. Still, something far more bizarre now lingered in his memories, and pain overwhelmed him, becoming more and more prominent as the horrorscape faded from all his senses.

At the same time, the irate feeling of standing on a precipice was gone, melted down into a sense of pure bliss, filling his mind with thousands of ideas. In this intermix of contradictory senses, the ideas came together, and their mental images sought each other.

The thoughts merged, growing larger and larger into a single compound, a compound that compressed into a dot.

A dot that floated in the sea of darkness, emitting a blue hue that fluctuated like a dying ember. Tiny scant cinders whirled around it. Its subtle glow, calming aura, and very existence pulled him in.

Vern stared at the glowing beacon with an empty gaze for a few moments before his eyes regained focus. And when they did, the twinkling particles around the dot faded, and a quartz-like sphere revealed itself. Tendrils of light manifested out of thin air and began etching themselves onto the orb.

The shiny threads weaved and sewed the globe with their ethereal light, and a radiant pattern emerged on its surface. It had some order to it, yet just as much was chaos.

When another one of these strings of light got into its place for the umpteenth time, the pattern shook and disintegrated into thin streams of light that spread within the bounds of the glassy construct. Light swam through the glass like some viscous liquid, this time settling in no apparent pattern.

Before he could inspect the object any further, the threads of light dematerialized with rippling waves of cyan. The scattered darkness gushed to claim back its estate. Visible in the ebbing luster of ripples, a crack ran down from the very center of the sphere as it split into two even pieces. Their gleams shone dimly . . . and they disappeared.

ARGHHHHH!

Vern’s mind shuddered as a searing sensation crept through his very being. It felt like a hole burned through his eyes, the pain pushing him past the barrier of his divested senses. With no energy to conjure stray thoughts to occlude his mind, he felt every bit of what was happening within his eyes. So much so he knew when his sclera evaporated and when his corneas were blazed, and something was plastered on top of his singed irises.

Lacking any practical method to vent his agony, he barely hung on to lucidity. Every second, it felt like a hot sigil branded his eyes and his very being, changing something within him.

The torment slowly eased out as a profound sense of exhaustion hit him in waves. In a sluggish tussle between delusional fatigue and survival, Vern forced his eyes open bit by bit, going against his primal instincts.

There was a peculiar transition, and it wasn’t dark anymore. Flames of purple and vermillion blazed all around him.