The Continuum

The duty I was sent for, that spanned around several months all in all, was commissioned by the Saintly Head for automatic undertaking as soon as possible, under total secrecy. I was to go to the further edges to find a particular Senior Cruz, whose trusted position, not to mention lack of hiding places within the Saintly Head organization made him, I was told, an infallible expert for the job.

            For several years now, the Continuum had been eating people up. I was told it had occurred most in it’s first few years of operation, a strange anomaly that none of them can explain up to today. At least it seemed so, it very well could have simply been top secret, as my own mission was to most people. After all, the vanishing of particular, seemingly random individuals within the Continuum research team would entail, at the very least, teleportation, and who knows what else. In its very implications it was significant. They simply vanished at random times, like they had left on their own accord, save no corroboration of them leaving their facilities, much less their rooms, could ever be found. And yet, the next time the Continuum was entered, there they would be, floating in the silent vacuum and dead.

            Now, why I was being sent on this particular occasion to fetch them up was purely political. The trans-social divide between the further reach and the central galaxy has led the safety of the Continuum to be at something of a risk. I change my mind, it’s wrong to put it like that. The Saintly Head was at a risk, not the Continuum. It is of the league of grand things that could never be at risk of human interference. After the Continuum was made, rest assured, no human could touch it again.

            Nevertheless, the ownership of the Continuum was at risk. Due to the position it was in, in enemy space, at least for the length of that transient war (NOTE: all who were educated at the time had thought that the situation at the outer edges was untenable and would not survive the first year. Of course, that all changed as the war continued far past all estimates). It was hopeless to send Saintly Agents to it, since they could very well risk revealing it’s presence to an unreliable enemy by the attention they would get being there. It was for this exact possibility, I was told, that the machine was built with many features to allow it to camouflage with the natural surroundings of deep space. Well enough, at least, that nobody worried about it. On it’s own, it was safe. It was only when times like this arose (when men and women needed to be removed from within it) that it was at risk of being revealed. And to leave those people there would be a horrible thing, and besides they were valuable for study. How exactly they wanted me to do the job, I didn’t know, but it was through this Senior Cruz I was supposed to learn everything.

            Senior Cruz was somehow trusted by the Saintly Heads so much that, not only did he know the exact location and means of getting to the Continuum, but he lived in the immediate territory of the enemy all the while. I still do not know if that was product of absolute devotion from him to them and vice versa, a rare thing to see in politics, or simply, to me, a surface level view of what could only be a complex blackmailing that occurred between this man of powerful knowledge and the government that so relied on him, yet had no means of talking to him, but nevertheless allowed him to live in such a place of risk. What made me suspect the latter, that he was, at the very least, rogue to some degree, was that they did not even know his whereabouts, to the point where I had to look for him first to begin getting to the enigmatic thing.

            Yet that was, in truth, not so hard. His various systems of habitation were known well enough, though he did go by multiple names. I got the feeling, eventually, that his obscure living was more to protect himself in the chance that the enemy learned how valuable he was, than in case he turned his back on the Saintly Heads, who really did seem to infallibly weigh such vital information on him. It wasn’t fair for me to make guesses anyways, when I did not know the entirety of the situation myself.

            The man I saw who was meant to be him was a short, round headed man, thickly set. He had eyes like the saskers of my home planet and of many other similar creatures I have seen across my travels, generally labelled as “reptile“. Thick, heavy eyelids that drooped over moist and gleaming eyes. He was a man that drank a lot, but nevertheless radiated experience. There was something deeply knowledgeable in his laconic and sombre movements. One almost became awed of him when they realized just how important he must have been to be so trusted by the Saintly Heads and to know what he knew. For the Continuum was nothing but a myth to some, a meaningless name to most. It had never been seriously pursued, and yet there the man was, sitting hunched over his table as he watched me come. He greeted me with a leering smile, and struck me immediately as one of those people who scorn everything, cursed by a dab of wit that left him loathsome and cynical and facetious. A man of remorseless intellect and insight, who retreats from the world to tyranize themselves for all the good it got them. What was strangest to me was that he wanted to talk it all in public. I remember thinking if the Saintly Head could see him then, would they trusted him as much as they did? But of course, the Saintly Head was far away, and without any show of force, an empty name.

            “Come, come, sit.” He said, in the local language. I complied and gave a look about. He, of course, read me.

            “It is safe here,” he said. “Don’t look about.”

            Now the idea came to me that this Senior Cruz had turned traitor. But the idea mattered very little. I am but a contractor, and even in the worst cases punishment to our kind has been lax, if not the heart and focus of the problem, then nothing at all, since we are of such value in these tines of war and free to sell our services where ever we like.

            “You know why I’m here.” I said.

            “Yes, I heard.” He said. “To clean the Continuum.”

            I flinched. “Should you really?” I asked, startled by his openness. He simply smiled.

            “It has been known here that I am someone special, for a long time,” the man said. “And nothing has come of it yet.”

            “You are trying your luck.” I said. And yet his smile was still there, gray as it was.

            “I’ll show you the way.” He said, emptying a tumbler of drink. “It is, in fact, really simple. I assume your vessel is the right dimensions?”

            “Yes.”

            “Adequately equipped?” He looked at me with the eyes of a practical man who, even in his current state, trusted he had checked through everything even if I had not.

            “Yes.” I said once more. The man seemed tempted to get another drink, but rapidly changed his mind and fixed his eyes on me, looking at me deeply and silently with those lizard like eyes, at that moment flickering with serpentine intelligence. I didn’t ask why he had done it at the time, but I believe he had been looking to see if I was right for the job. The sort that was good for the job, or, at least, trying to deduce how I would react to it. To the Continuum.

He must have gained an affirmative in some manner, for he sank a bit in his seat and looked at the empty tumbler sitting on the table contemplatively.

“We will have to fly in blind, nose first.” He said.

I was silent. “I was never told that,” I said. I was wondering if that was something I could trust him enough to do. If I could trust anyone that much. It was completely insane.

The man just smiled and laughed again. It was a sound that wasn’t happy. It might have sounded weak, exhausted, to some. To me it was simply and quite strongly apparent that it was distracted, that the man was working away secretly in his own schemes just as much as his mind was evidently working amidst our conversation.

“They couldn’t have told you much.” He said. “After the renovations they barely know the Continuum themselves. One in a thousand does.” He said this as a tired fact, raising his cup and looking into it again like sheer force of will might refill it for him. “One in ten thousand,” he said.

“May I see your credentials?” I asked. Again his expression vanished, and on came the smile. He was definitely estranged, within if not without.

“I did not ask that of you, when, truth be told, you are the true stranger.” He said. “How do you expect I know all of this, if I wasn’t who you think I am? I am Senior Cruz!” He said quite loudly. This, I could see, had been done with the drunk urge to get a reaction out of me. I flinched at  the sound of that classified name entering the air.

This is an incident he would later apologize for. As we went through the blackness of space together, he explained that his position has left him alone and isolated in ways that transcend mere relationship with his fellow peers, and he apologized if this made him act undesirably at times.

Until now I still hadn’t learned much about the exact whereabouts from him, and that I asked.

“It is to do with one of the planets,” he said. “You see, from all the ones in this solar system” (There totalled fifteen) “one is not like the other.”

            “In what way?” I asked, soon enraptured by his own enthusiasm, if not the matter at hand.

            “It is the planet.” He told me. “It is absolutely marvellous.”

            But the more worrying detail he had been unable to resist telling me at the start floated back to dispel my enthusiasm.

            “What did you mean when you said we would have to enter head on?” I asked.

            “Well, you see, my friend, there is only one way inside the Continuum. Certain people, like me” he said, gesticulating, “of a method you need not know, nor could understand, are accepted into the machine by such a means of entry.”

            “Nose first?”

            “Yes, but don’t worry, you won’t crash! I assure you. It simply involves letting go of that old prejudice, descended from the apes, of falling from great heights.”

            “And it will work?”

            “Of course!” The man said, almost disgusted. “It is the Continuum!”

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            So we came upon the planet. An uninhabited straggler. An ocean planet, though the ocean was not chemically useful or interesting in any way. It was, by all means, a mundane planet on the outside.

            As I came in front of it, though, I felt the need again of confirming Cruz was who he said he was and not just come creative maniac willing to commit murder suicide for me tag along like a fool and be laughed at by posterity. When it was confirmed again I looked at at the grand blue planet we were pursuing. If what he was saying was true, just under its skin hid the Continuum. I was nearly as anxious of that as the prospect of hurdling towards it might have made me. It was no doubt the imagination alone (or was it?), but, gazing at the planet and knowing what it held, one could almost feel and see the power of the Continuum inside.

            “The Continuum is there.” I said. I found it hard to believe.

            “Yes.” He said.

            I regained my focus, and yet there was a change discernible, even to me, in my own voice.

            “How will we do it, then?” I asked. He put his hand on my shoulder, said with something almost like relish:

            “We go straight at it.” He said. “No turning back.”

            “Just like that?”

            “It is simple enough.”

            “Why don’t you do it?”

            “I’m a bad pilot.”

            He was right in that it was simple enough, and yet I did not find that very comforting. Simple as walking off a cliff edge, yes, if one could just turn of all their fear receptors and close their eyes. Ever since the incident, in more than one way, I have been eternally changed. This was just one of the first experiences in that long trip that would change me.

            I uncertainly started the thrusters, the man watching me carefully.

            “You must commit to it,” He said adamantly. “I don’t like the look on you. That is more dangerous than anything.” It was true that if I had my doubts about the veracity of his promises in the fatal moment I could kill us both anyways trying to change the direction of the ship.

            “Can you do that?” He asked me. I turned to him. His voice in that moment was reasonable, and for once, for a very short time, I saw the young man he once must have been, endearing and handsome. Who knows the countless people he had said that to before in his life. To researchers who trusted him, or loved him. Now he was quite different from that person I knew bits and peices about from the Saintly Head files, and still, somehow, I nodded. Of course, there was also the fact to consider that, at that point, the mystery of the Continuum was too strong for me to pull away from, no matter where the path went.

            So I engaged my thrusters and disengaged all locking systems but that of the planet itself.

            “Any place in particular?” I asked.

            “Anything will do.” He said.

            So we began our headlong hurtle. I watched the planet grow large in front of me, wondering if I had lost my mind. But the mystery was too much, too great, and I held back from doing anything. The blue orb soon overwhelmed us, and become increasingly vivid in its blue monotony.

            As we approached the surface at faster and faster speeds, as alarms started to go off throughout the ship and I felt the sickening forces of momentum upon me, I searched the surface for signs of what was supposed to receive us. The surface, racing towards us incredibly fast, showed nothing.

            “Are you sure it can see you?” I asked, panic making me talk absurdly. Yet as I turned I saw that he was sitting in something like a Buddha pose, his eyes closed and lips sealed, and I thought to myself that he really was mad and I had been stringed along so easily.

            We broke the atmosphere. Now the ship was singing with heat. The ocean grew. I reached for the handles once, yet something held me back. It might have been that we were too far gone now. To deep, too fast to turn back, and I understood that. It might have been lingering curiosity that poisoned my actions. What that moment taught me was that my life. None at all, compared to the bounties of curiosity. Because in spite of everything, I tried to stay calm, tried to hold on to that feeling of the Continuum waiting. The thoughts which should be my last were that if it was not to be, it was nevertheless a worthy way to go out for me. At such moments one does not think about if they will seem foolish in hindsight or not.

            The water continued to magnify and spread, and soon we really did pass the point of no return, where any lack of commitment now only meant we would be squashed in a different angle, in a different way. So it was, but when I finally unfroze and seemed to regain my senses with a shout, when the front view suddenly filled with the texture and colour of blue liquid, the ocean split. At first the ship seemed to be carving through it like it was the cutting force itself, but the splitting out sped us until I could no longer see anything but darkness. One could see the water around us and the darkness down below, in the abyss the space in water had formed, but that was it. At our velocity, and with the monotony of our surroundings, it seemed like a solidly formed tunnel. If it werent that it rapidly became darker, and darker, till the lights within the cabin activated to allow us to see at all, it would have been hard to tell we were moving anymore at all.

“You may slow down now,” he said. “Not too much.” He broke me out of a stupor.

I was more than glad to activate the thrusters to slow us down. Where we were, you could now hear a great rumbling amidst the confined darkness that moved around you even though you could not see it. Sounds from the immense ocean’s weight being held from crashing upon us. It was so loud and pervading even through the ship it seemed to enter you. From beginning to end, that rumbling could be heard and you could feel the weight of the fluid surrounding you.

I turned to see Senior Cruz looking at me with tears in his eyes.

“Do you believe me, now?” He said exaltedly. “Do you believe now?”

We flew downwards through the tunnel for quite some time. It was quite an uncomfortable experience, I will admit. With the changing gravity (first we grew heavier, then lighter, as we approached, then entered, the planetary core), the general discomfort from our vertical orientation, the feelings of nauseau left from acceleration forces we experienced on entering the planet, which I had not thought to prepare myself for, and the force of the invisible but rumbling ocean around us, all combined to make it something surreal and overwhelming. It had been for some time now inky dark as space itself outside our visor, so you would not be faulted for thinking we had entered a wormhole of some sort. The only illumination was the lights we had in our vessel, and we seemed so far from reality and its rules. This was a feeling that become almost overwhelming in the heart of the Continuum, though, truthfully, it was only one of many sensations bound to overwhelm you could find there. I realize one would have to be very strong to go to the Continuum frequently without losing their mind. I myself was gripped by such forces of feeling I found myself paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of it all.

As we approached the core of the planet gravity turned nonexistent. Besides the rumbling, there was no reason not to think we had somehow actually returned to space. Even the rumbling, I believe, could be explained with a like counterpart in some stranger part of the cosmos we have not seen. Maybe in the many dimensional tunnels supposed to exist by theoretical physicists these days, it rumbles like that. After my experiences it has become impossible to disbelieve in such other realities humans would be alien to.

Now whether the Continuum really was seated within that planet is a good question in of itself. Knowing what I saw, I cannot dispel the notion, however far fetched it might seem, that we had entered an entrance to another realm entirely, where the Continuum actually resided. The tunnel we were in could very well be one of those previously mentioned, as dark and unknowable as it was. As for Cruz, such details were never elaborated. Some part of me doubt he knew himself, and whenever referring to my incapability to understand, that he was stating an axiom rather than a matter of circumstance.

Then, far off in the depths beneath us, shone a single light. From the very end of the tunnel a single red eye watched us approach like the eye of a great beast dormant in the heart of the sea, revealing just how distant and deep we really were. It filled me with fear and awe, and for a heartbeat I feared what it could do to us in wrath, error, or whatever else guided it.

“Now — slow down more” His voice seemed so small in such a grand place. To interrupt the natural sounds seemed a sin to me and, being a novice where he had at least some experience in what now seemed so bewilderingly otherworldly I could not imagine how anyone could call themselves “experienced” in it, so I kept my mouth shut and obeyed.

“Good, good,” he whispered, as we slowed down. It seemed fitting to whisper there. One thing I realized later, on recollection, was that the rumbling of the surrounding ocean curtains, which should have been deafening by that point, had instead vanished entirely This, and other things such as the atmospheric temperature and pressure at the centre of that planet, seemed abnormally effected to be safe for human beings.

The red dot awaiting us grew nearer and nearer as Cruz coaxed me into going slower and slower, until, eventually, to a stop. I made the ship horizontal. What I saw was that the red light was round and about the size of arm’s diameter. It did nothing, yet before it I felt some kind of awful pressure, as if it was the first seeing eye of enigmatic God.

I know not what processes might have been occurring then, so many intricate complexities that it would be pointless to even begin speculation. What happened is that, beneath the red light, an aperture appeared, only visible by the glow of light from within it.

It was just the size of the ship, and nothing needed to be said from him for me to go inside.

Oh God, whatever form, shape you are! My hands shake as I recount this, even though it is not the first time, nor the last time, I think about it. I wish I could go there again, if just for a moment. A moment that would last an eternity, if it did not crush me.

As I entered that world I almost could not comprehend it. For a while my mind subdued my sensitivity, thoughts, and emotions, as if it knew the risk of overworking them. The shutters closed behind us, and I heard a sound. It was barely audible at all. The sound of the water collapsing over itself again. I remember thinking on strength of this place, this parasite that had replaced the true core of the planet with computing power. Just like that, we were in it, with no sign of how we entered or could come out.

The place we now found ourselves in was a vast space, really immensely large, of dark and weightless vacuum. Far off I could see glowing green lines, black white and gold components like those on circuit boards and computer nodes canvasing everything, glowing in pulses. I could see the work of man in the sharp angles and smooth surfaces of this creature that was so incredible, because it was so material than not. I wanted to touch the surfaces and feel the power thrumming within them. I could see the men who made that vast abyss of quiet computation, and yet it seemed the work of something else, something greater. Nature, or something even more powerful than that.

“Did we make this” All the while it glowed. Like we were suspended in the air of a vast, large cave system, the arteries of God, many paths tunnelling up, down, left, right, and forward, all glowing with that technological hue which seemed the sole thing that connected it to us, all full of mystery. It seemed easy to get lost. The idea of being stuck there, cold and isolated as it was, made me shiver. Cruz, once more, read my thoughts.

“Can’t die. Can’t get lost.” he said. “We are nearly immortal here.”

But not those it consumed.

We searched for the dead scientists. With lights we combed the darkness where it was impenetrable and where it glanced back off of glowing circuitboard surfaces. Not hiding from the light, the divine place instead revealed itself in all its material fullness, basked in the fact that it was there and it was real and we could touch it. The surfaces, as their glowing had given off, were endless patterns of plating, alloys, circuitry, and computer microcomputers. Human technology. And for every surface were spots unique from all the others. Each and every part had been made by human intent. Every panel, every component of the green circuitry had been decided and included in the grand design by human will. It was our greatest achievement, our greatest culmination of thought and willpower, and it was an enigma we would probably never understand.

Once we saw a black substance coating one corner..

“I have never seen that before,” Cruz said, voice astonished. “Leave it as it is.” This was a world that had once been made by man, but had since become entirely incomprehensible to him, with anomalies and ecosystems. It could be regarded merely in awe, as the product of our will.

To give the vastness of the place, it would have taken a good several hours to comb one chamber solely by one wall. The ship’s tools allowed us to not be forced to do such a thing. It was found in the third such chamber we entered, by the low wavelength radiation it was giving off. With arm attachments I retrieved and brought it inside the shuttle. Then for some more time we lingered on.

How it was that we eventually left need not be discussed. One miracle after another and one loses taste of the general sanctity of it all. Simply let it be known that I do not know what effects such immensity would not have on everything, neither what hasn’t been affected within myself by witnessing it. To come to such close proximity with a God, one risks everything. It is the trait that would drive men mad if they went too many times. To enter such an immense place and come out, scrambles the human perspective so extensively as to leave nothing of the old world behind. It confuses us, beyond rules of life, to things in themselves — thinking in itself, living in itself, existing in itself. As I said, it utterly scrambles the mind on what matters and what doesn’t. In the end, all that matters, and decides what matters, is the Continuum.

We went back in complete silence. Not a word was said, and not a word needed to be said. To say a word of any sort beyond the basic necessities was to show vanity in face of the unconquerable, which we felt we were fundamentally incapable of doing. The corpse was dead from the vacuum. She was still dressed in her pyjamas, around six feet tall, with long blonde hair, an easy face stretched with fear. Why had it taken her? Who knows? This incomprehensible thing did not give or require explanations. All there seemed to do was think about how it must have seemed to her, finding herself in such an awful place in the blink of an eye. That was if that was how it had happened, of course. There is no way we could know. It was random cold violence. Inscrutable, unknowable, and of a scale that dwarves you and I.

I can see why Cruz drank, looking back. Things seem much more fragile in a universe with God. Once countless people contribute a little bit to something big, we become authors of our own dieties. We can recognize that, but in all else we are slaves to their infinite mystery.