CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - The First Voyager

"Will it hurt, nurse?"

"Not a bit." The scientist lied to the slumping test subject that sat before her, for she did not truly know.

The haggard young man, bound as a mummy with wires and tubes, looked nervously away and towards the metal box beside him. Through veins, thin and wide and running in rows along the protrusions of the system, pushed gently an ink-black serum; nay, it was much darker than ink, so dark and unreflective that the man could not be sure he was seeing anything at all. They slithered through their tunnels and into the veins of his wrist, and he noticed where the tubes kissed his arm his skin had turned a ghastly white. The red flush of hot blood below his skin filled these blotches the moment each tube was plucked out. His body was pungent and sour - he had not been permitted to clean himself with anything but the water provided to him from the hose in his cell.

When the last tube had been removed, she pressed one arm below the patient and lifted him to his wobbly legs. The man noticed at once that his room had been filled by various other scientists, who were now regarding him impatiently. Feeling their icy eyes on every embarrassing feature of his malnourished figure, he reached swiftly to retrieve his gown from utop the metal box still beside him, but his hand was shooed away by his nurse.

"You won't be needing those," She cooed. "Come."

But her stout patient had frozen in his steps, and his head shook sideways with his eyes locked to his feet.

"I don't want to do this no more," he gurgled.

"Come."

And there was something searing in how she said it now, something lethal, contrary to her otherwise fluttering, quiet voice. It was the sound of rose petals that had aroused him so, when she first mentioned this opportunity to him along the side of the road.

Her choice in winter attire had been quite - somethin' else, Bill had thought, but who was he to have any opinion of the fashion of the rich and prosperous, someone as worthless as he. She'd been sporting a grand, cylindrical hat, not unlike the wide and stout water towers around the city - the sides were wound with bright red feathers and down, their heaving plumage bursting from their quills atop the hat's rim, its shadow a black mesh veil that fell down unevenly over her pale face and striking golden eyes, before winding tightly around her neck down to her collar bone. Her coat was long and white, like any of the old-world's scientists had been, but it was fluffy and plump with clouds of black sheep's wool, and it hung dramatically from her shoulders over a tight silver body-suit peppered with diamond mirrors, reflective as to make her shimmer like a migraine aura, half present against the grey winter sky and the tall abandoned towers behind her. In every luminescent sequin, the man saw his tiny, entranced reflection one thousand-thousand times over. His eyes climbed from the coils that curled as prison-wire tightly along the tops of her equally dazzling ankle-high stilettos, to the woman's pelvis - turning, bending her frame into contrapposto, to the sequined hands that she held now to her abdomen, up her slender torso and once again into her golden eyes from behind the veil.

"Yours is the epitome of transcendence," she had spoken sumptuously, "Yours is to find god. Follow me as a babe with his mother, and remain very close - there are those who would see you denied this ascension."

He was lost as a sailor to a siren, and he did indeed follow behind her very close. The boldness of the extravagant art that she sported scandalously kept him undetectable in her shadow.

It was when they had reached the factory's gates that poor Bill had noticed the dreadful familiarity of the establishment, and the gravity of her proposal.

"People that come in this place never come out," he slowed his stride and was now shaking his finger nervously at the gates. "This is where they brought that baby some hundred years ago. That damn baby and its parents sure never came back out."

Her answer was instant and grim, as if she'd anticipated his words: "I promise you, my dearest compatriart, more have left this factory than have stepped inside."

Obviously, the man had followed her in regardless, and as such he found himself where he was now: In a sealed glass compartment, framed with beams as black as the serum they'd pumped into him, and he heard the heavy door behind him slide shut firmly. The muffled clammer of the scientists' boots against the cold marble floor told him they were getting from away from the chamber, and into their own glass encasements to observe.

"I don't see nothin'," the naked man called from inside the chamber, his nose wrinkling from his odor when his hand reached his mouth.

"It sees you, Bill."

The scientist who spoke to him readjusted her spectacles; large disks of glass held in front of her eyes by frames as thin as wire, that bent snugly behind her ears. She was going for a rather nostalgic look - vintage, even, as neither she nor her mother nor her grandmother had ever worn anything like them for any medical purpose. Yet, she'd chosen to wear them this late afternoon, during her last shift of her day, to witness the first voyage unto the void. She thought perhaps, if there were a god of time, they might favour the celebration of its juxtaposition.

She called again to the slouched man:

"Please step forward very slowly."

But Bill had already begun to do so. His feet slid slowly across the marble, fighting the heavy, wet air and the pressure that already bound him tightly, pushing his eyes back gently into his skill, the feeling of cotton pressed into his ears.

As the blinding colour found his skin, a glow that could not be seen by his spectators, he felt the pillars of his reality fall one by one. First fell time, and suddenly the moment felt flat as paned glass. Sound, sight, smell and feel, every sense as hot wax bled together into one vast, all-consuming perception; bright, loud with the rolling thunder of a whale's call and blaring radio static, the feeling of cold ice and hot flame, woven and patterned across every micron of his skin.

Last fell his ego, and like a sugar cube in hot tea, it melted away into the currents around him. We receive this ego, this observer, into our boundless ocean. Unfettered from dimension, this knowledge will nourish our singularity.

The body, abandoned, burned away in white flame until it was no more. The watching scientists blinked, including the one behind stylish spectacles, and the air was silent and tangible as they waited for one another to react.

"Not a single particle was exchanged," a man spoke at last, his voice muffled from his glass encasement. He was looking intently at the electronic display that hummed in his lap.

But Bonka could already see that what the man said was untrue, as a film now coated the glass chamber's floor; dark and lustrous as pyrite, releasing smoke of gas and plasma. It corroded and dissolved its confines of time and space, and Bonka could feel the fury of one trillion emotions screaming into the very air the vapours kissed.

Seduced, Bonka kept his eyes locked to the chamber. He stepped down from his pedestal, which separated both quarters of the auditoriums viewing encasements, and descended another small staircase before approaching the glass room's door.

He heard the gnashing of its ravenous teeth, its wails of confusion. He felt the air's pressure rise and heave as he neared it, even from this side of its cage, and it beat rhythmically as a heart inside its hearth of ribs -

It cried as a frightened infant - and, for the first time in the timescape of his entire current existence, Bonka was overwhelmed with a desire to nurture and protect it. As if even he, man of electromagnetism and missing mass, could not help but become a matriarch for a life that yearned for his shelter.

His hand, skin and metal woven through veins of silicon and carbon, grabbed the door's handle.

A woman behind him cried, "Bonka, wait!"

Nonetheless, Bonka, abandoned of care and enveloped in his impulse, slid the heavy door open, and the hot wet vapours that had churned, compacted, in the crystalline case now erupted into the open space of the auditorium and out through the walls into the city beyond. Every scientist at once was killed, and so aggressively so that they hadn't died in that moment, but before Bonka had reached the door at all.

To his senses, the steam felt as no more than a sudden, warm embrace - but the machine's very core was consumed with love and adulation.

"My flowers, the next observer," Bonka whispered to it, his voice deep with reverence; he was now on his knees before the sap that coated the floor before him. "I will make of you the world you desire."

And the sap trusted him.

Thank you, my mind's observer, for feeding yourselves upon the projections of my conscience through your device's display. Feel free to respond to my telegraph and leave a review to let me know what you thought of this chapter!