CHAPTER 38
Outside of Time
Abstract Space
In the minds of humankind, darkness was something to dread, possessing the power to penetrate the coldest of souls and the hardest of hearts. In all their years of existence, Isaac, Bethany, and Riley had never witnessed darkness so dense that it felt like a wall of chaos threatening to crush their souls. The instant they stepped through the sphere, they lost their senses of time and space. Their minds seemed countless millions of miles away from anything they had ever known. Their eyes darted around, desperately trying to find even a suggestion of light.
Bethany felt her arms and legs trembling. She took a deep breath as she looked down at her body. Despite the impenetrable darkness, Bethany could see every part of her body as bright as day. She could feel herself moving but, despite being able to see herself, she felt dead inside. It was not a type of death she was familiar with. She felt as though she had never existed. Her breathing intensified and she struck her chest, expecting to hear the clang of her armor. She heard nothing. There was only a fluctuating, barely audible echo in the distance. Bethany retracted her facial armor, then touched her face.
"Where am I?" she wondered. "What am I doing here?"
Bethany tried to look down at the floor but nothing was there. She could feel the surface she was standing on, pressing against her feet, but she couldn’t see it or anything else. She lowered into a squat, then slowly reached down, expecting to touch the surface. Instead, her hand passed through it. Bethany gasped. She stood up and looked around.
“The sphere…” she mumbled. “The sphere! Riley? Isaac? Can you hear me?” Bethany gazed around, trying to find them. She turned and saw Isaac standing horizontally, at what appeared at least a mile from her, but she could see him vividly.
Isaac was not wearing his armor. He was reaching out in front of him as though touching a wall. A set of coruscating diamond crystals appeared in front of his hands, resisting his push. Isaac’s eyes widened, the shine of the crystals reflecting in his eyes. He could feel an entire world around him, yet all he saw was darkness. All he heard was a fluctuating clinking that never ceased. He withdrew his hand from the crystal, faced a different direction, and repeated the gesture. The same crystals reappeared, pushing back against his hands. Whenever the crystals appeared, the clinking grew slightly louder.
As Isaac stared into the crystals, he heard a faint echo of his name. He turned his right ear toward the crystals. He heard his name again. This time, he realized the sound was coming from elsewhere. Isaac followed the voice with his eyes and saw a woman standing in a strange position. It was as though she was walking on a wall. Isaac narrowed his eyes, wondering whom he was looking at. Slowly, he recognized her.
“Bethany?” Isaac gasped.
“Isaac!” Bethany called back, their voices bouncing back and forth in the endless void. They started running toward each other, moving as quickly as they could. Isaac stopped and looked back, then at Bethany again. He didn’t know how long he had been running but he knew the distance between them had not changed.
Bethany also stopped. She looked around, then toward Isaac. “What’s happening? Why does it feel so strange? Are we dead?”
Isaac pressed his hands to the sides of his face, then moved his hand toward his eyes and removed his glasses. He stared at them for a moment. He hadn’t worn glasses in the three years since Riley brought him back in time. Riley had pointed them out as a weakness if they were broken or removed. Instead, he programmed a pair of self-cleaning contact lenses from his nanites. Isaac hadn’t worn glasses since.
Bethany was confused. “You didn’t have glasses a moment ago.”
Isaac traced his finger around the frame of his glasses, then put them back on. “Weren’t there three of us?”
Bethany shook her head. “I think there were five. We came with Lily, and… um…”
“Who’s Lily?”
Bethany staggered back and stared at her hands with despair, on the verge of tears. “Isaac, where’s Lily? What happened to her?”
“Not Lily,” Isaac said. “Who’s Riley?”
“Riley?” Bethany’s distress vanished as quickly as it came. “Riley.”
Isaac gazed around, looking for him. From within the darkness, luminous dust appeared. It formed a cluster, then grew into a small, shaggy dog at Isaac’s feet. The dog barked, wagging its tail restlessly. It turned around and chased its tail for a moment, then waddled toward Bethany, sinking deeper into the ground as it went. Isaac and Bethany followed it with their eyes and saw Riley standing perfectly still a few meters below Bethany. The dog stopped at Riley’s feet, then circled him, barking and licking Riley’s armor. Riley didn’t move.
“Riley!” Bethany called. She wanted to run to him but didn’t know how to. From her perspective, he was beneath her. “Riley!” she screamed.
“Riley!” Isaac echoed.
Riley remained still, even as the dog played around his feet. The dog stopped running, then slowly dissolved into the cloud of light that had formed it. The cloud swirled for a moment, then blew away. Riley also dissolved and blew away, vanishing completely from sight.
Isaac inhaled sharply and screamed, “Riley!”
Riley rematerialized in front of Isaac but no longer wore his armor. Instead, he wore his old mecha pilot gear. Isaac stumbled back, startled by Riley’s sudden reappearance.
“You don’t have to scream,” Riley said, calmly. “Sound doesn’t travel here. There’s no atmosphere. Your perception here is a product of your mind; it does not affect your surroundings.”
“What does that mean?” Isaac asked. “And how do you know that?”
Riley smirked. “Think, but don’t expect to make things conform to the rules of the world that you know. Keep your head in the game, Isaac.”
Taking heed of Riley’s words, Bethany closed her eyes and dissolved into a shapeless cloud of sparkling dust, then rematerialized beside Riley and Isaac. “Our bodies aren’t here, are they?” she asked.
Riley shook his head.
“Then they’re back in Jericho. Right?”
Riley nodded. “We’re here now. Let’s focus on that.” He looked into both of their eyes. “Do you remember why we’re here?”
They nodded.
“Good. Let’s get moving. What do we know so far?”
Bethany reached out and the coruscating set of crystals materialized like a wall, pushing back against her hand. She withdrew her hand and they disappeared.
“What can we do without our suits?” Isaac asked, looking down at his clothes.
“You were a scientist long before you ever wore armor,” Riley said. “We’ll do it the old fashion way.” He reached out and pushed against the darkness. The crystals formed against his hand. He held his hand still, staring at the crystals as the light shifted from one bright color to another. Riley looked toward the wall. He could hear something coming from the crystals, like a pulse. He withdrew his hand, then pushed again with both hands, creating a larger wall of hundreds of sparkling diamond-shaped crystals.
Bethany and Isaac joined him. They stood on each side and pushed with both hands, making the wall even bigger. As the wall grew, the pulse became louder. Soon, everyone could hear it.
Bethany frowned. “Is that a pulse?”
Isaac was unsure. “It almost sounds like a heartbeat.” He looked at Riley. “Can you hear it too?”
Riley clenched his teeth and pushed as hard as he could against the wall. It wouldn’t move. He stopped pushing, then walked toward the wall. Nothing stopped him. Riley turned back to Isaac and Bethany. “We’re not alone,” he growled.
“What?” Isaac gasped, looking around in a panic. “Did you see something?”
“In this abstract plane, your perception is limited to what you can imagine. To see beyond, you not only need to accept and acknowledge the existence of other people’s perceptions, but you must also be able to comprehend them. Someone’s putting this wall around us.”
Isaac’s eyes widened and he panted for breath as fear quickly took hold of him. Bethany inched closer to Riley. She was also struggling for breath, sweat sliding down her forehead. Riley remained calm, looking straight ahead.
“Remember,” Riley said, “nothing you see here can hurt you unless you believe it can.” He reached forward and pushed. The crystal grew. He focused on the pulse and, suddenly, a shadow zoomed past behind the glowing wall. It moved so quickly that none of them saw what it was. Bethany and Isaac jumped back, bumping into Riley. He withdrew his hand but, even after he did, the pulse remained.
“Don’t acknowledge it,” Riley warned again.
They could now hear the pulse as clearly as their own voices, circling them.
“Can we leave now?” Isaac asked, his entire body trembling. “I want to go back right now.”
Bethany grabbed Riley’s hand and held it. He didn’t stop her.
“Maybe we should leave,” Bethany whispered to him. The pulse suddenly ceased, as did the echoing clinks in the distance.
Isaac shuddered, his knees shaking so violently that he was struggling to stay on his feet. He remembered Riley’s words. “It’s not real if I don’t believe it,” he muttered under his breath.
With blasts of bright pink, purple and orange light, the walls around them were illuminated, forming a series of bizarre intersecting groups of crystals with no end and no beginning. Beyond the walls, they saw a massive snake-like shadow slithering back and forth. When it moved behind one wall, it moved behind every wall.
“Oh my god!” Bethany exclaimed. “Riley, what do we do?”
Isaac calmed himself and watched the shadow as it moved about. “Riley was right,” he said. “It’s goading us. It wants us to acknowledge it. Don’t worry, Beth, it can’t harm us.”
Booming laughter erupted from every direction. Bethany and Isaac covered their ears but Riley stood still.
“Riley Karlsson,” a deep voice said from beyond the wall. The shadow stopped in front of Riley and disappeared from behind the other walls.
“Why hide behind a wall?” Riley growled.
“You have endured countless trials to come here,” the shadow said. “How you accomplished it, I can only imagine.”
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Isaac and Bethany realized that the shadow was speaking from behind the wall in front of Riley and turned to face it.
“Janus?” Bethany yelled. “Is that you?”
The shadow laughed. “That is not my name.”
“It’s true then. You’ve been manipulating the Children of the Corn to do your bidding.”
“Indeed. They were mere apes, countless generations from what you are now. I evolved them before their time, gave them things they should not yet have possessed. I refined them into something formidable.”
“Yeah, yeah, we get that,” Isaac said, impatiently. “But why?”
The shadow lurched forward and crashed through the wall. Suddenly, the trio was standing before a white light so intense that they had to shield themselves with their forearms to avoid being blinded. Only Riley didn’t move. He looked straight ahead, gazing directly into the light. The light was so vast that the three of them felt like ants, staring up at a god.
“Riley Karlsson,” Janus’ voice thundered from within the light, “has made it his destiny to destroy me before I have lived. Is it not the basic right of every being in the universe to be born?”
Bethany squinted into the light. “Live? Does that mean… the sphere… it’s an egg? Oh my god…”
“You thought I was a product of human error, an accident,” Janus scoffed, and the sound was deafening. “Your inability to see beyond the limits of human perception has blinded you from the true nature of things.”
“What does that mean?” Bethany asked.
Janus sighed. “Your life, your choices, your every action. Have you ever asked yourself if they were truly yours? Or are you simply playing your part in what has been predetermined?”
Riley turned to face away from the light. He grunted. “If that were true, if you’re inevitable, why did you try to stop me?” He waited a moment for Janus to respond but Janus said nothing. Riley lunged toward the light with a roar. “Answer me!”
The great light flickered, then began pulsing rapidly, dimming with each pulse. Suddenly, it vanished. Riley, breathing heavily, turned to Bethany and Isaac. They saw the spark of light in his eyes and shuddered.
“It’s time to leave,” Riley said.
“Okay, okay,” Bethany stuttered. “How can we do that?
Riley took Isaac and Bethany’s hands to form a circle, then closed his eyes. Isaac looked at Bethany, then they also shut their eyes. The three of them focused their thoughts on the outside of the sphere. The darkness around them suddenly swallowed them with a gust. They were outside the sphere, back in the Pillars of Jericho, but they were shapeless, floating in the air. They could see the sphere below them but they couldn’t possess their bodies as they were no longer in Jericho.
With a zap, the darkness reclaimed their souls, dragging them back into it. In an instant, they reappeared in the abstract plane, still holding hands as they had been.
“What was that?” Isaac cried, shaking from head to toe. “What the hell was that?”
“Hey,” Riley snarled. “Get it together, Isaac!”
Isaac nodded anxiously. “Where are our bodies?”
“I don’t know if this will work but we have to try. We may be here but we’re still tethered to our bodies, as long as they’re alive. We just have to find them.” Riley closed his eyes and reached within himself. “There’s a connection between the body and the soul. Find that connection and follow it, wherever it takes you.”
The darkness yanked Riley from their midst, then Bethany, and finally Isaac. Isaac felt himself enter a strange atmosphere. He moved through the roof of a building, then saw his body lying unconscious on the floor near an enormous pyramid. Isaac moved into his body and immediately felt his heart beating again. Isaac gasped for breath as he woke. He ran his hands over his body and tearful laughter escaped his mouth. Isaac gazed around and saw Riley and Bethany on their feet, looking down at him. Bethany offered a hand to Isaac and helped him up.
“That… was… insane…” Isaac wheezed. He raised his hand and looked at his nanite bands. The band dissolved and formed armor around him. It was only after the armor had formed that he became aware of his surroundings. Isaac looked around. If he had not just traversed the abstract realm, he would have been perplexed by his new surroundings. All he could do was look at Riley.
“Where the hell are we?” Isaac asked.
Riley was staring at the pyramid. He remembered exactly where he was, but he didn’t know why their bodies were there. As he stared at the pyramid, it glowed in the gaps between the layers. Riley, aware of what was about to happen, turned toward the door and shouted, “Run!”
They sprinted at the door, moving at supersonic speed. Before they could escape, three powerful tachyon beams shot from the pyramid, engulfing each of them. The beams stopped them in their tracks and lifted them toward the roof. The scientists screamed as the energy overloaded their suits’ quantum reactors.
Unlike Bethany and Isaac, Riley didn’t scream. He didn’t even know why they were screaming. They felt no pain; the shielding of their armor kept the energy from getting in. The beams released them and they fell to the floor with three loud clangs. Bethany turned to Riley, scowling. She opened her mouth, about to speak, when a pink breach opened behind them and sucked them in.
It felt as though they were tearing through the star ways, zipping across the fold with blurred streaks of light surrounding them. Before they could take three breaths, a breach opened over Jericho and spat them out. They landed hard, bouncing several times before stopping.
Riley grunted and shook his head. His entire body was hurting. He could only imagine how Bethany and Isaac were feeling in comparison. When he looked down and saw his hands, Riley forgot the pain. His hands were engulfed by purple flames. Riley recoiled and tried to put the flames out but to no avail. He looked around and saw Bethany and Isaac also engulfed in the flames.
“Sky,” Riley snarled. “What the hell is this?”
“They are tachyonic particles, Riley. They’ve taken over your quantum drives. The reactor rods are currently holding but not for long. You need to purge the energy and fast.”
Riley glared maniacally at the sphere. A vision of the sphere engulfed in purple energy flashed in his mind. Riley staggered back and touched his hand to his head. He didn’t know what would happen but his visions had been accurate so far. Riley clenched his teeth as he turned to face Isaac and Bethany. The flames around their armor were pulsing so violently that the fabric of space was being distorted. Bethany and Isaac looked at each other, desperately trying to figure out what was happening. With each second that passed, the pressure in the armors increased, and it was nearing critical.
Riley opened a communication channel. “Let it all out!” he shouted. He faced the Sphere and extended both arms in front of him. From his hands, a thick beam of tachyon shot out at the sphere. Bethany wondered what Riley was thinking. How would adding fuel to a flame get them out of their predicament? She recalled how the sphere had absorbed her shots earlier. She nodded at Isaac and they joined Riley, firing everything they had at the sphere, and hoping it would repeat its previous behavior. The tachyon rippled across the surface of the sphere and, slowly, the purple spread, eventually covering it entirely.
They continued to release the energy into the sphere until the tachyons burned out from their suits. By that time, all three were kneeling and exhausted. Bethany fell forward, relieved to be free of the flames, while Isaac fell back and looked up, grunting loudly. Riley got back to his feet, wheezing. Suddenly, it was silent. They could no longer hear the subtle hum of the sphere, nor even a breeze. They watched as the tachyon spread around the sphere’s surface, with no clue what to expect.
Sky appeared on Riley’s display with a look of concern. “The sphere is changing rapidly.”
Small vortexes appeared on the surface, spiraling back and forth in different directions. Riley leaned forward. He thought he had heard something, a sound he remembered from the abstract plane. He focused but could no longer hear it. Riley turned to Bethany and Isaac. He was about to speak when he heard the sound again. This time, it was clear, and the expressions on Bethany’s and Isaac’s faces told him that they heard it too.
It was a pulse, a heartbeat. It continued, growing louder by the second. With each pulse, the sphere swelled, then it shrank. When it shrank, it remained larger than the previous time it did so. The stronger the pulse, the larger it swelled. They looked at each other with concern.
Riley retracted his face armor and looked at Isaac. “What’s happening?”
Isaac, who continued to stare at the sphere, opened his mouth to speak but no words came. He could only gaze fearfully at the expanding sphere. The pulse became so loud that their heads ached. Bethany and Isaac held their heads in agony. When they could take no more pain, they expanded their armor over their faces and dashed away from the sphere.
“Riley!” Sky called. “It’s rapidly amassing energy. It seems to be struggling between here and the other place, as though it can’t decide where it wants to be. I think it’s going to explode.”
“What kind of explosion are we talking about?” Riley asked as he backed away from the sphere.
Sky was silent.
“Sky!” Riley yelled. “How big?”
“This can’t be right,” Sky said. “This shouldn’t be possible.”
“Sky!” Riley yelled again. “Talk to me.”
“Riley, if my calculations are correct, it’ll wipe out the entire star system. It will be the equivalent of a supernova.”
“What?” Bethany exclaimed. “How can we stop it, Sky?”
“I… don’t know,” Sky confessed. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
Riley stopped near the zero-point energy barrier. He fell to his knees and sighed. He was sick of trying, tired of failing, exhausted by nothing ever working. He had done everything he could but there was no way out. Janus was right, he thought. The end was always inevitable. Despite their best efforts, they had only made things worse. All they had accomplished was bringing the end forward by nearly two hundred thousand years. Riley closed his eyes and wished he had never been born. He wished he had never met Patricia Evans or Isaac, or even Bethany. At least countless generations would have lived before everything ended. Riley retracted his armor completely. As he exposed himself to the swelling heat of the sphere, the temperature was unbearable. The sphere was becoming hotter by the second but Riley no longer cared. It was time to stop trying. He had once heard that men will always be men, and gods will always be gods. Riley sighed.
Bethany saw Riley and sprinted to him. She fell to her knees before him and retracted her face armor. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “You can’t give up. Not now.”
“I’m tired,” Riley muttered. “We’ve failed so many times. All we do is make things worse. I’m done trying to change fate, pissing off the universe. I’m done, Bethany. I’m all done.”
Bethany looked deeply into Riley’s eyes. She tried to find the right words but, in truth, she felt the same way that he did. She hadn’t been trying to save the world for nearly as long as Riley, but she had also reached her breaking point. Bethany lowered her head. She sat beside Riley, looking at the sphere as it expanded toward them.
“I guess this is it,” Bethany said. “I guess this is where it all ends.”
Sky’s hologram appeared beside them and she sat down next to Riley. Sky gently touched Riley’s arm and rested her head on his shoulder.
“It’s been an adventure, Riley,” Sky said.
Riley chuckled slightly. “You’re damn right, Sky.”
While the three of them waited for the end to come, Isaac remained on his feet, unmoving. He had been working on calculations in his armor, searching for another way. He gasped. This might just work, he thought. He looked over to the others. There was no time to explain to them, so he transferred his calculations directly to their suits.
A holographic screen appeared in front of Riley, and another in front of Bethany. Riley squinted as he looked at it. He had no idea what he was looking at.
Bethany jumped to her feet. “Oh my god!” she gasped. “This might just work!”
Riley pushed the display away. To him, it was just another disappointment waiting to happen.
“Riley,” Sky said. “Suit up.”
If it were anyone else, Riley wouldn’t have moved. Coming from Sky, he knew there must have been a chance. Riley jumped to his feet and his suit immediately wrapped around him.
“If this works,” Isaac said, “it might solve all our problems. Look at it. It’s nearing critical mass, which means it isn’t indestructible. Despite its many mysteries, it turns out it obeys at least some of the fundamental rules of reality.”
Riley stared blankly at the ground.
Isaac sighed, realizing he needed to speak in Riley’s language. “Imagine I remove you from today and place you in exactly the same space you will be in tomorrow. What do you think will happen?”
Riley shook his head. “I don’t know. Chaos?”
“Exactly,” Isaac beamed. He walked a little closer to Riley. “Even if the existence of two spheres in the same place doesn’t cancel each other out, we will have successfully undone the mess we’ve made here. I can’t say for sure that it will work but I think we need to try.”
Riley nodded. “Just tell me what I need to do.”
They moved outside the zero-point energy barrier and waited until the sphere reached it. The barrier slowed the sphere’s expansion but it wouldn’t last long. They spread out, standing around the sphere in a triangle. They each raised their hands, releasing nanites from their suits. The nanites spread over the surface of the sphere and formed a solid container around it. Once the container had completely formed, Riley, Bethany, and Isaac had no nanites remaining to create armor. They moved further from the now-contained sphere. The sphere struggled to expand but the container briefly slowed it. Cracks quickly began appearing.
“It won’t hold for long, Riley!” Isaac shouted. “Do it now!”
Riley faced the holographic image of Sky standing before him. He looked into her eyes and, for a moment, he remembered his mom and his dog on the beach. Throughout his many years in isolation, Sky had been the only constant, his sole companion. She was a sister, a friend, a partner.
“This was always a one-way trip,” Riley said.
Sky nodded and smiled. “It’s been one hell of a ride,” she said and embraced Riley. Riley held her more tightly than he had ever held anyone, knowing he couldn’t break her. He wished there was another way but they were out of options. They slowly parted.
The sphere was cracking its containment. Each time a crack appeared, the nanites filled the gap and solidified to keep the sphere contained. Lights appeared across the surface of the armored container as it booted up. Riley and Sky exchanged one final look before she disappeared. The sphere accelerated, spinning faster with each passing second.
The three of them looked at each other, turned away from the spinning sphere, and ran as quickly as they could. With a loud crack, the sphere imploded and disappeared, leaving only a whirling wind in its wake. They stopped and looked back at the space where the sphere had been. Riley stared at it for a moment, then turned to Bethany, shaken by the loss of Sky. Gradually, a smile crept onto his face. Bethany ran to Riley and embraced him. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her passionately. Isaac ran to them and they stood there, their arms wrapped around each other. None of them spoke but they each wondered if they had truly done it, if they had finally destroyed the sphere and prevented doomsday.
Their moment of peace and triumph was brief. In the wake of the implosion, space folded in on itself, creating a black hole barely larger than a football. The black hole began pulling everything into itself. The trio slowly parted as they became aware of what was happening. As soon as he saw the hole, Riley knew the universe was about to take another giant shit on them. They ran away from the hole as fast as they could but it was futile. The gravitational pull increased, dragging them back. Isaac was the first to be pulled in, then Bethany followed. Riley struggled, his fingers sliding through the sand as he tried to stop himself. It didn’t matter and the hole pulled him in. As soon as Riley passed through, the hole disappeared.