CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Voidblood's Will
The heaving of Charlie's breast slowed as his panic was diluted by the burn of winter's air in his lungs. He remained crouched against the gravel, his skin as bright as warm milk against the mosaic of falling snow against the winter sky.
"What do you want?" Charlie asked his spectator venomously.
Bonka grinned down at him, his pallid features longer and pointier than Charlie remembered. He was bent forward threateningly towards the boy, shivering before him in the white falling snow, and Bonka slowly withdrew his cane from Charlie's skin - a stark white mark faded quickly behind it.
"I want you, Charlie," the machine answered him. "Precious mind, unseduced and uncorrupted."
In that very moment, Charlie wanted to decline him, truly; but he found himself silent. He looked beyond the factory's gate and watched the line of small, orange men approaching ominously, their quick strides peppered with the spicy gyrations that made their auburn skinsuits shimmer in the rolling moonlight. Their collective, climbing over one another into two proud pyramids, pulled open the iron gates through clouds of blowing grey snow, their metal screeching as banshees through the quiet, sloped neighbourhood behind them.
Bonka smiled at him, wrapped in night's velvet.
"Michael sent you here; didn't he, Charlie?" The machine spoke heavily, a canopy of thunder over the squeaking of his silicon fingers: "He thought this was your home? My oh my. The purity of his intentions were always so charming; but, even as light, it is his humanity that keeps him ignorant."
Charlie rose to his feet.
"I do not fear the abyss, Bonka - how could I? My very eyes were born of its womb." He stammered, "I have carried this body through a life as rich as I could provide it, bestowed upon it all the pleasure I could scrounge from the soil of poverty. The sights and the sounds I've danced in are translucent and tepid in contrast to the lives of others', but I am at last relieved of the ceaseless cry of want against the light-polluted sky."
The boy stood shivering, naked and goosebumped with winter's chill. With the piercing screech of nails across a chalkboard, Bonka, now beside him, helped the orange men push open the factory gates against the ice-warped pavement. The two of them strode slowly and quietly through the expansive courtyard.
"You're a wreck - when she checks, let your mother break your neck." Said one girl to another, the pair walking briskly on their thin legs below heavy winter garments. One girl carried heavy, curly brown hair that was haphazardly tucked into a densely knitted cap, whilst the other carried a bright white bob that bounced with the same weightlessness as she. They had stumbled out from a metal door far to Charlie's left, from one iron column of the U-shaped factory, and into the crunchy snow on the pavement.
"It's secrets that tie people together." A lower voice echoed from Charlie's right. "I'm a beetle and I could eat this honey forever."
Two boys - or is it more? Charlie wondered, watching them.
Bonka pressed his hand firmly against Charlie's back, urging his Flower Child more urgently towards the factory's entrance.
"If I killed God and then myself, who would reach Hell first?" one or some of the boys responded.
"Why would you be tied to your body's consequence? I have no doubt that this body will return to ash and wet dirt, Adam, truly - but I would have every intention of surviving beyond my flesh's demise, and I shall wander the compiling ether until I find new matter to poison with my ego."
"Evan, if time is a fourth-dimensional fractal, as you mentioned earlier - one with beads that grow and separate as bubbles in cold oil, then surely that is something you should tell the professor?"
Charlie turned his head again as the brown-haired girl to his left spoke once more. "I have died and visited the kaleidoscopic void, the starry ocean of consciousness of the outside furtherverse, my form reflecting shapes and flame of colour back into the brilliant tapestries all around me. The tranquility of the loss of my ego, the dispersion of my will and regret into the peace and absence of purpose, I could bring none of it with me when I returned to my form. I am without hope."
Charlie heard Bonka's lips, behind him, open gently over his dry teeth - he heard the beginnings of an exclamation chirp quietly in the man's throat, but none reached the air.
Another boy spoke in the man's stead, his burlap-draped form stepping down a short flight of iron stairs just ahead. "It would only be a detriment to each organismal universe's objective - would it not, Verona? A blow to life's impetus? The desire of the void?"
"What do you know of the void?" Charlie spat violently to him, overtaken at once by fury that singed every inch of his skin. "What do you see of its will? You, simple computer, radio boy - you have only kissed its surface, you and this machine - I am the one who knows of the fractals and the bubbles and the stones that form in the sap - I am the one born of lightless ultraviolet, of plasma and blood! You, naught more than the echoes on vapour in the heaving beast's quadrillionth lung, and a greedy machine born of its mortar! I am the one raised as infinity, it is ME who is born of machine's sacrifice of a world, born from the blood of five children and cream - cream, diluted and simplified, Voidblood made malleable and perceivable."
A rush of cold gripped Charlie's face, and with a gasp he fell down from the spiralling torrent of time and death and felt his eyes pulled open from behind his head. A cold finger under his chin, Charlie turned his bloodshot eyes sharply downward to find his hands pressed against a familiar red carpet.
"We have only just entered the factory, Flower Child." Bonka spoke deeply beside him, his bare finger still below Charlie's chin. "Already you fall to the siren's call of the incision. Stay with me just a little longer. Your time has all but come."
Charlie sluggishly turned the dry, glazed marbles in his head to see the machine. Surrounded by the yellow, patterned-wallpaper of the empty space beyond death, he was disoriented by the notion of his morality; that he carried a body that moved, always, towards eternal slumber, and at the sublime unknowing of what that meant. The divine curse of life's compromise, that in exchange for its existence, it must die and be reborn without ever finding answers.
Charlie whispered sadly, "I have been to the space beyond time, and there was no one there."
Bonka replied. "There is no there, because they are all inside you."
The two of them, after a moment's desperate respite, continued slowly down the factory's hallway, where Charlie had entered the building that very same - whenever it had been.
I have disintegrated into whispers, and this chapter found me there. Now I have brought it here, so that it can find you. Please leave a review for it, or follow the story for updates!