Chapter One Hundred Sixty-Eight: John Rearden, Part Four
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“What… what is this?” John gasped, the words torn from him as he struggled to catch his breath. They soared above the world, far from the chaos below, watching as it unraveled in waves of dark energy, cities fracturing, landscapes warping into shapes that defied nature.
“This,” Jack’s voice was vast and layered, reverberating through the air around them, “was the last Convergence.” He paused, his gaze distant, almost mournful. “And it’s coming again. Only this time… I’m not sure anything will survive it.”
John stared, and they pulled back even further, a hum growing beneath his skin. It was unreal, he was seeing the edge of his sanity peeling away.
“Do you see it yet?” Jack’s voice was everywhere.
Scenes folded back, like the pages of a cosmic book flipping in reverse, one after another. The stars expanded, then collapsed, then drifted apart again in a kaleidoscope of time. John felt himself moving further, stars slipping away, until he could see it. It wasn’t clear at first—a double image, an echo across the vastness of the universe.
Maybe the radiation dust was finally doing it, getting inside his head, his bloodstream, tweaking his perception until the seams of the cosmos unraveled. Plenty of folks cracked under the pressure of the storms, their cells reprogramming under the flood of charged particles, minds twisting with them.
But there was something about this—it wasn’t madness. It was bigger than madness.
Jack pulled him out even further until the entirety of existence hung like a fragile glass bauble. John sucked in a breath. He floated amidst total nothing. No light, no blackness, just… nothing.
“When the universe was born, it thought it was the only one of its kind. Quite presumptuous for a universe, don’t you think?” Jack smiled, a glimmer in the vastness.
There was nothing, and then there was a pulse—a vibration, a field, a light that wasn’t light, a place that wasn’t a place—an idea more than a thing. The first something where there had been nothing at all.
Jack’s voice resonated softly. “It was a young thing, unaware of the truth—that it was born into something far, far larger.”
John blinked. “That’s… ours?”
“Or are you its? Yes, to both questions, if you want to be poetic about it.”
Jack moved again, a subtle push, pulling the view back just a little more. John’s breath caught—universes. Not just theirs, but others, alive in their own way, drifting and circling each other, bodies of light and darkness.
“Nothing is alone, not really. Not even universes,” Jack murmured. “And it wasn’t long, a few billion years at most, until our little universe discovered that fact.”
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There was something stirring deep inside John. A feeling that had always been there, that hum in his bones, a resonance he’d ignored, like a tune he’d grown up with and no longer heard. And there, in the endless dark—a word came to him, echoing, almost forgotten but so utterly familiar: Ours.
Jack’s smile grew. “Every universe has a name. A truth. A resonance. It’s not a word, not as we think of words, but it’s something known deep down by anyone who truly belongs to it. I think you’re starting to hear yours.”
Ours. It sounded… beautiful. It wasn’t just a name; it was an invitation, a promise.
Across the void, something shifted. Another universe, gliding, moving in its own orbit, its trajectory shifting—heading toward Ours. John’s heart thudded in his chest.
“No, stop.” The words tumbled out, a whispered plea. There was a strange, instinctive protectiveness in him. He could feel it, deep as blood, like a parent fearing for their child.
“That one’s mine,” Jack said, his tone a curious mix of affection and sorrow. “Your kind will know it as Terra Mythica. The world of myth. Though that is no more its true name than ‘John’ is yours.”
The two universes drew close, faster now, an unstoppable collision in motion. John flinched as they came together, a cosmic impact. The crash was silent but resonated through everything—a collision not out of malice but out of the inevitable play of physics and fate.
“It was an accident,” Jack breathed. “An innocent one—two children colliding in playful chaos.”
John watched as their universe fractured. It broke, and yet it did not. They split and yet twisted, melding, shards shifting together.
“This…” Jack gestured, the nebulas swirling into shapes that felt like memories—ancient and new all at once—“This is Convergence. Two universes, through force or affinity, becoming one. This is when I first met yours—when the early life of your galaxies brushed against mine. And from that chaos, life emerged, reshaped forever.”
They hovered above a world awash in strange colors and flickering lights, a living canvas of hues and brilliance unlike anything he’d ever dared to imagine.
John felt the world drop away beneath him as Jack placed a hand on his shoulder, and together they moved, not by steps, but by intention. The universe itself shifted around them, bending to Jack’s will. One moment they stood suspended in a twilight firmament—planets spinning like marbles across a cosmic table—then they glided forward, passing between galaxies like slipping through doorways.
Jack’s fingers twitched, and the universe rippled, guiding them to Mars. The surface expanded beneath them, as if they’d plunged straight through the clouds. John felt the crackle of electric energy at the shift, the strange awareness that one moment they were standing above all things, and the next, they were amidst them. The verdant plains of Mars stretched beneath John’s feet, rich with a deep, primal green, vibrant and alive in ways that defied the very name he had known for so long. Yet somehow, he knew it was Mars—something inside him felt it with an unshakable certainty.
They hovered just above the ground, untouched, as if standing on a layer of air. Titanic giants moved across the endless green, each step shaking the earth, their massive forms imposing against the horizon. In the shadows of sprawling, alien trees, elfin tribes moved unseen, delicate figures weaving through the branches and moss-covered trunks. Jack let them wander—ghosts in this chaotic paradise, silent spectators among meadows that pulsed with color and life. Strange creatures chased each other through the grasses, their bizarre forms looping and darting in great arcs, laughter echoing on the wind. It was beautiful, impossibly beautiful—a living dream painted in ever-shifting hues, so vivid it felt as if reality itself had burst into bloom.
Then, without warning, the scene unraveled around them. The greens of Mars twisted away, replaced by the rich blues and greens of Earth. It wasn’t a jarring motion, but a subtle shift, like thoughts rearranging themselves. John found himself in the sky above Earth, among flocks of iridescent birds, their wings catching the sun like shards of stained glass, fluttering beneath a gentle canopy of cloud.