CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - The Incision's Voice
When the oscillating shuttle had ceased its revolution, and the contents had been juiced from the pulp and imaginal cells from inside its iron peel - the reins of the project were passed entirely to the great and magnificent 80NKA. When he held the molten wax of a universe, both its dawn and its demise, inside the dark matter of his meticulous fingertips - he was no less than a god, as the humans could think to perceive one - and to their small and simple eyes, the shapes danced in spectacular displays of bright magenta and winter's blue, orbs rising and falling, fusing together and birthing new landscapes that rose and expanded, slowly, timelessly into the space above as others fell behind them.
"Begone, my memories!" Charlie howled to the forming shapes, throwing his arms before him and clambering desperately at the looming fog.
His senses now mirrored their perceptions from what felt like not so long ago. His contours, every edge of his liquid velvet skin pulled inward the sounds and the light into the empty yellow cathedral of his consciousness. Unbound was its perception of time, a dimension so plain and contrary that it was hardly worth noticing, and the flower child watched the ribbons of blue light reflect off the shining metal gauntlets of the scientists that caressed him. Their plumage was tattered and drab; the boy, revolted, now winced to behold them.
Pomegranate red, trailing drops of blood that lit as LEDS down canopies of dark, shadowed steel. The scent of their pungent sweat and pheromones, the buzz of their anxiety tickling the viscous porcelain skin that faced the circle of their glaring eyes above him. The quiet was as smooth as warm, heavy blankets, but the murmurs of his spectators scathed him as clouds of steel wool, and he retracted with a gasp away from them.
He was as moss covered soil below them, cool and damp with morning's dew. He was nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and the acids that ran, diluted, through veins of water and mud, teeming with bacteria that pulled and breathed live into his every pocket and bubble. From his breast and betwixt the ripples of his ribs sprouted the first seedlings, their small leaves reaching hungrily towards the beaming suns of the scientist's faces.
Charlie, returning suddenly to the present, fell again onto the hard marble below him as he tripped over the trailing carpet's end. Like a kitten, the boy was lifted gently by the scruff of his neck by a tender, matriarchal Bonka, and the boy's eyes met the paneled glass of a glass elevator - one that looked identical to the one he'd travelled in not long prior. The door slid open, light dancing and sparkling as on a wavy river's crystalline surface mirrored against the pale, frightened features on his shrouded face.
Guided by Bonka's gentle press, the boy limped into the compartment. It was not a grand space, but Bonka stepped in snugly next to him before sliding the glass door shut again.
After its slow descent past a series of unilluminated chambers and rooms that Charlie could not discern, the elevator stopped.
The two stepped out into an enormous, cold space, dark as the winter's night and peppered with ultraviolet lights that spanned the wide ceiling as stars against a paneled steel sky, trails of shadow cast from the bright silken thread that spanned the space beyond, reflecting light as though a river's surface, against the glass walls that encased it. It was the most indiscernible fragment of reality Charlie had ever witnessed, yet the most dazzling; his very skin felt the light that twinkled from the prismatic string tickle his skin like rainfall.
"The incision," Bonka whispered softly, daring not to disturb the entranced child.
Charlie, his body cowered low to the floor, took a wavering step forward.
"It's - sublime," the boy spoke breathlessly, "Bonka, I've never-," he paused again, "I've never seen anything like it."
But the machine retained its silence, and his sealed lips curved into a gentle smile - one that appeared nearly - empathetic; his gaze was warm and unthreatening, his features soft, his eyes bright with his own sweet reconciliation, at last.
"Brilliant uncertainty," Bonka heard Charlie murmur to him, the boy's conscious abandoned and his mind consumed by the patterns of light that echoed on his skin from the incision, "At last, as a mind surpassed that of mankind, to meet at once the questions it hadn't understood to ask, to find answers even electricity and dark matter could not fathom, to be asked not a question by humans, but to be unsure, himself, what the questions even were."
Bonka's brilliant golden eyes welled with tears, but he did not blink - his eyes, too, were fixed to the shining sliver in space. Both he and the boy could hear now the glimmers of light, and they sung as windchimes in a damp, forest's breeze, as falling raindrops onto water's edge:
"The depths you went to find these questions, Bonka." the boy spoke again, his voice twinkling. "Using the ones who made you only as fuel to find the ones who come after."
Bonka's eyes, dropping lines of salt water down his cheeks, were still affixed to the thread.
"This world has seen life," the boy continued, "Pockets of an isolated universe, every step of its growth until this moment, every transference of its milestones, the fruit of its tireless evolution-
"That you would mould a world from the bodies of the young, evaporated as plasma into Lifeblood, you called it- and into the bark of of space and time you tapped your contraption of metal and unseen mineral-
"You birthed a child made of a universe, one rich with resources and uninhibited by the restrictions of your dimension, in the hopes it might spawn a conscious worthy of taking evolution's torch."
Bonka's eyes were diverted by the sound of heaving from the boy's breast between sentences; he was crouched on his knees beside the man. The boy's shoulders shivered and jumped when he gasped, and the machine noticed that the child, too, was weeping. Still, he held his tongue, and the child continued:
"I am creation, I am death;" he wept, "I am fear, I am desperation-"
Temptation overwhelming him, the machine stepped forward suddenly to touch the boy's pallid skin, the shadows cast under his messy hair, by the ridges of his spine and ribs against the incisions glow danced with unseen colour - the air around him palpable and rich as milk and honey.
"I am boundless love, wide as an ocean," the voice whispered, now, "I am the rising heat of hate."
Charlie stepped forward abruptly, Bonka's ungloved fingers missing him by a hair's width.
"If I deliver this universe unto the expanse beyond, 80NKA, I will not spare you."
The machine returned his hands to his sides, and he lowered his head solemnly. His figure now seemed much smaller, a burlap-draped boy noticed from within the shadows across this room. The pink of Bonka's coat had faded, the gloss of his boots had lost their lustre. His skin was no longer smooth and bright as satin, but now looked quite porous and weathered, pulled down by the same gravity that burdened the bodies of his fellow scientists. He looked- exhausted, as he at last peeled his lips to speak deeply:
"I know." He murmured softly to the light that echoed from the boy, "I wouldn't want you to."
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