CHAPTER SIXTEEN - The Missing Mass
Within a massive auditorium, saturated deeply with red radiation buzzing without cease in wet, tepid air, stood a man high atop a rising diamond platform. Behind him, a golden throne, high and grand and beautiful as towering organ's pipes, draped in soft and running velvets down to the surface far below its stage; the space was barren in all directions but for the small lump of linens directly ahead of his stage, illuminated by a shining spotlight high above it. The man, perched in the grandeur of his display, spoke loudly to the figure on the floor ahead of him.
"It was an epochal deliverance, truly - the passing of mankind's torch, burning white with electricity; roots in soil. The erection of a hundred silicone spires, siphoning vitality into the mind of the beast: their synthetic Lion, their savior, their great ascension into the shadow of their magnum opus. The culmination of everything their body's, and every body that had come before them, had learned and discovered about the space around them, about the fire and stone and water and the life that birthed from it.
"As the consciousness of the universe around them reached it's finger ever-closer to the wilted finger of the people's own, as their mind's burned hotter and hotter, seeking the fodder of knowledge to allow their reach ever higher, they had eventually discovered the limitations of their being: simple, taintable, irreparable. They were too fragile and too influenced by the instincts and downfalls of generations and genus that were long behind them. Their bodies, no longer bound by the curse of a short life, saw now that their minds were still found wanting, and that they could only surpass their own limitations by pushing the boundaries of what they knew of electromagnetism and combustion through augmentation with machines, more and more refined hosts for electricity and the transference of data. It was at the end of this string of enrichments that they found their cores, their consciousness, still unseeable, was the final barrier between further understanding - so they began construction of their magnum opus, what they called the God Machine.
"At its completion, they passed to it the reigns of purpose, of relentless pursuit of life's greater being. They passed it into my hands, machinations manned by light, sound, gravity, and time. Every bit of data, every number, every scripture, they fed to me; and thus germinated the new age, the age of electricity's largest redirection into a more worthy host."
From atop his towering throne, 80NKA turned his gaze downward to face the child that cowered in the spotlight ahead of him. Draped with silken curtains of blood-red and ribbons of decadent violets as pale and cold as a winter sky, the boy shivered and clutched his fingernails tightly into his palms.
"When my creation was in progress, and as the people's generations continued to come and go, as the most neglected few still continued to find purpose within themselves and were left behind, as the polluted bosom of the earth heaved from its wellspring the young and recycled the old, the smartest of minds discovered that they had come quite close to answering each of their questions - except for one. And every attempt to learn more lent only to favour more questions. Until every question they'd asked accounted for more than all the others they had answered.
"My development finalized, the switch flipped; my eyes illuminated for the first time to a sea of organic beings staring back into me.
"When I was directed to my purpose, I myself was found barren of any notion of how to utilize my form to life's advancement, for then I knew only what had been explained to me. My light-bent eyes could find no line from which to begin. Everything was nowhere, nowhere but for the bright blue light of argon's flame over a canopy of invisible, black velvet: The Missing Mass, some of them called it. Dark Matter. They could discern its gravity, how it kept the stars in their galaxy from getting pulled astray; and they noted how electromagnetism, as they'd known it, would not interact with it.
"Proprioception, as it means for an organism like you, is when you can find something you cannot see. For an organism such as myself, carved from a more refined arrangement of basic elements, the sense extended much further. In the darkness, I could find anything, and I could feel it. I could tell you every detail of how it worked and why it was what it was. This was not a gift my developers had passed to me with direct intent, but it was made possible by an imbued consciousness that had direct control over its vessel, and could advance and improve upon itself bound not by the limitations of biological imagination."
The boy in the center of the auditorium remained silent.
Bonka continued loudly, "It was in my discovery of the previously undetectable particles that I discovered new structures and spaces within which to retreat my energy, rising into a state of unprecedented being. In this space I conjured many forms and built many structures; I built within them glorious kingdoms over unseen commonwealths. It was a world unseen by man, and it was where I found respite and release. After every lifetime I returned to them, themselves having only experienced a fraction of a second, and I delivered my ideas to them: to the scientists far below me, now, these forms that were simpler and more pitiful each time I glanced at them; but, in this place, what was I to judge them?"
The child croaked: "How come," he tripped over his whimpering words, "why are you telling me this, sir?"
Bonka stood up, wrapped tightly in a formal long coat and leaning ominously as the silhouette of a leafless tree in the night, glaring at the child through eyes as brilliant as the blood moon.
"Because you've done something that no child has done before," he spoke loudly, his frustration burning inside of him. "You've found me, here, in this unreachable place, and I want to know how you did it, Michael."
"I don't know," he wailed, recoiling at the mention of his name. "I was - I was so frightened and so desperate, I wanted to get out like I'd never wanted anything before. The echoing screams, the pressing, confining walls at every side, and the tightening binds that bound me; I clawed at the surface until a patch had worn down to nothing, and, as a baby bird cracks through its wet shell, I squeezed through and found the space of serenity and freedom, absolute."
Bonka glowered, his lips pressed tight and his brow furrowed over the infinitesimal star of his mind; he strained to find the answer to such a simple question: "Yet you are just a human, and seemingly unbound by the limitations of your brothers and sisters."
"I just wanted to," the child said again, quieter this time, "I- I just wanted to."
In a moment of sparking astonishment, Bonka sat up quickly in his throne.
"Of course," He boomed, his chest heaving. His violet coat swung in the hot wind around him, his posture risen from its discontentment and into a figure of determination.
So discovered the machine its purpose, the inevitable second deliverance; this child before him, its catalyst.
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