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| Issue #3 May 2008 |
"Trials of the Mind" Written By Ed Ainsworth |
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Nate reached out with his mind, hoping beyond hopes that he’d manage to grab the meme bomb before it hit again. Strain, frustrating and plain pleading guilt wrote itself across his face, as Thor prepared to throw him towards the construct. The God of Thunder had changed such a great deal in the last few hours he was reeling from what was going on and what he could do to help.
It was all so complicated. As Nate reached out, he just wasn’t fast enough to grab the bomb, as it banked violently away from him, and crashed into the collection of minds before him. The blast itself was powerful enough to throw both Nate and Thor into the fluid below, Thor skipping off the surface, and Nate plunging into the depths.
As he rose from the water, he realised that this area of the mind reef had several tiers. Thor was resting on the upper tier, of perfect looking brains, whilst under the surface of the water, more brains nestled together, around them two fields of strange looking brains, some completely different to what Nate was used to, the others looking between human and completely alien.
“Roht?” Nate spoke, not realising that he was speaking backwards from the effects of the Blast.
Thor rolled onto his front, and sorted out his plain brown tunic, walking to the surface of the water, and reaching down to Nate.
“Anet?” The bomb had altered their minds slightly; their language had been changed considerably. Nate shook his head and pulled himself out of the water, reaching out with his Telekinesis and trying to pull together the common threads of language from the brains around him. They were all so different.
Managing to recombine the different strains of language, into a double helix structure, he pulled it back towards himself, and then into Thor, who looked more and more confused by the events.
“What was that?” He asked, looking around at the tiered levels of brain fields.
“Meme bomb disrupted language in this area, amongst other things.” Nate crouched down, bare feet still in the liquid, and dipping his fingers into the water. He had many ideas recently, being in this place, it was like an expansion of the mind he’d not even considered before, like Electro music was going off in his forebrain whilst hundreds of ideas were being generated a second.
“There’s a beat to this place, Thor. A heart beat almost, but it’s not quite...it’s not quite there. Something’s off, really off.” Thor looked confused as Nate spoke to him, he couldn’t hear anything. The Norse God looked around and grabbed hold of his body, as if trying to keep warm.
“I don’t really understand what’s going on that well, Nate. It all seems to be happening quickly. Too quickly for me to process. What about Threnody? Should we really have left her there?”
Nate looked up from his investigation, bare feet padding the short distance over brains towards Thor.
“A man is a terrible thing to waste.” He smiled to Thor and clapped a hand on his shoulder, aiming his direction down at the water.
“We’re in the Speciation territories now, Thor. It hit Faith and now it’s hit evolutionary variation.” Thor looked confused, these words weren’t exactly part of a God’s vocabulary, and he scratched his short blonde hair and inhaled deeply.
“So....?”
Threnody woke up with a start, she’d been left by Nate and Thor, and she wasn’t overly happy about that. The growth’s appeared to have died down though, she slapped her shoulders, and across her forehead. Her dark skinned features had often been marred by the brain like growths that had moved over her body. Her hands gently grazed her own flesh....Where had they gone?
She got unsteadily to her feet; Nate had planted something inside of her mind. A mission, that he needed her to do and all she could do was feel the fear of it. She was going to journey to places no human had ever been before, something that Nate couldn’t do.
Threnody transcended life and death, moving in between, as human living purgatory, but without the physical torture. All of her turmoil and torture came from within, the resistance to her own abilities, her desire to break through it all and just absorb as much death energy as possible. She knew it was bad, she knew it would eventually kill her, like any addiction, but she wanted to. Every waking minute of every day it was in the back of her mind, niggling.
She would go on this mission for Nate, but not for the reasons he wanted her to. She pulled her legs up to her chest and took a deep breath before she started to cry, and shake violently. She’d do it, but she’d do it on her terms.
Once she’d sorted herself out a little.
“You know who the Eternals are right?”
Thor nodded. Of course he knew who the Eternals were; he’d fought against many of their number on many occasions.
“They’re an evolution off-shot from humanity. Seems humanity has a lot of those. “
Nate banked through the air, avoiding an empathy root, stretching up in a helicodial fashion towards the heart-land of human consciousness. Thor followed him; he was on foot now, running over the minds of humans all over the world.
“And?” Thor asked, vaulting over a fear-root, and dropping into a crouch for a moment, taking a chance for a breath or two.
“So, they’re off-shots, their speciated from humanity, along with Atlantean’s, Inhumans, Deviants.
Medusa looked up into the “sky”, the Blue area of the moon was beautiful, and the stars shone even more brightly without any diffraction from the atmosphere. She ran a hand through her long, red hair, as she held her husband’s hand tightly, pushing her body against his.
Black Bolt held her affectionately, saying nothing, but his eyes and soft touch speaking a multitude of volumes no other human nor Inhuman could desire more than Medusa. She melted into him, as they both stared into the star speckled sky. Romance was dead to humanity, but Inhumans were a breed above and beyond the normal jaded results of urbanisations and sublimation, and continued its traditions.
As Medusa looked up, she saw something jetting through the star-scape, or more importantly, through the star-scape towards the two of them. Looking worriedly to Black Bolt, he pushed her gently away and shot into the “sky” to meet the oncoming forces.
It was an Eternal attack Squadron, and they met Black Bolt in the sky, eyes burning with crimson energy. Black Bolt lifted his hands up, the universal symbol of stop, but Ikaris and the others simply hung in the air like flesh coated bullets, and shooting forwards into Black Bolt, as four Eternals spun him helicoidally into the moon surface below, exploding into high-reaching fragments of moon rock and dust.
The only sign of Black Bolt’s involvement was the arc of lighting that exploded across the surface of the moon. Medusa held her hands over her heart, her hair tightening into huge knots.
“Gorgon.” She whispered.
“Right.” Thor answered, leaping over a particularly massive head.
“Why would it target Faith and then evolutionary off-shots of humanity? Is it even targeting anything?”
Nate paused for a moment, dropping down next to Thor, and grabbing hold of his shirt to prevent him from running off the edge of the world.
“We’re reached the drift-shores, Thor.” Nate pointed outwards, within the “sea” below them, hundreds of thousands of minds floated, never touching each other, and clumping together like a fish shoal.
“Why are they doing that?” Thor asked, standing on the very edge of the cliff.
“With the Atlanteans, Inhumans, Eternals, and Deviants – Their forms are very different from ours, their minds also, go to different places. If you were to explore the mind reef, like I have, you’d know that there are literally thousands of different minds connected to this, Thor. Faith is just a tiny, tiny area of it. The Gods’ think of themselves as such massively important beings but this...”
He gestured outwards, as the shoals moved around each other, millions of Atlantean brains, moving under and above the water, while the Inhumans bunched together in a giant mess, moving around each other.
“Look, on the beaches. These are the only off-shots who don’t really ever leave the unconscious mind realms, the Eternals. We need to be careful of them, Thor.”
Across the ocean floor, thousands of soldiers marched. They looked so different from each other, holding thousands of different forms, humanoid and otherwise. The Deviant army was marching from Lemuria.
Through the barren plains of the very depths of the ocean, where nothing lived but Echinoderms, the army marched. As they ploughed through the depths and the trenches the gloom began to lessen, they were reaching their first attack point.
The City of Atlantis.
As the Atlantean look outs called, the first waves of warriors were at the gates to meet the Deviant army.
“State your intentions.” The blue skinned warrior yelled, shining armour covering his chest and body, while a huge sword rest in his right hand, levelled at the deviants.
“War” The Lead Deviant gurgled as he tore off the Atlantean’s head.
“WAAAAAARRRR”
“Hrnk.” Nate bowed backwards, blood gushing from his nose and his ears. He dropped onto one knee and looked up at Thor.
“Something’s happening. Grnf..The Red Queen is moving into action.” He gripped the side of his head, as Thor grabbed hold of his shoulders.
“Nate? What is it? Who’s the Red Queen?”
Leaning over the edge of the mind-reef cliff, the blood dripped into the sea below, smaller minded creatures dipping in and out of the water to feed on it.
“It’s a theory. It’s the evolutionary arms race, you develop something cool to stop something eating you, and something else, or the predator develops a way around it. It’s constantly trying to better the things that are trying to kill you, or push you out of your niche.”
“So, what does that have to do with this? All of this?” Thor questioned his Hammer heavy on his belt suddenly.
“Look, When this is all over, I promise you we’ll go and see someone who can explain it better than I can, Thor, but at this point let me say this – Eternals, Atlantean’s, Humans, Deviants and Inhumans, they’re all parts of a big, big evolutionary arms race, Mutants are involved. Everything is, and at this point, the arms race is about to turn into a war. A great, bloody, war.”
“Well, what can we do? Here? We can’t affect things from here, Nate.”
“You can’t, but I can. Here’s the plan....”
Threnody landed hand on her side, and reached out for help. She was in a different part of the mind reef, a separate area all together, the further she got from human mental-planes, the more difficult she found it to think. If it wasn’t for the fact that her own abilities made her skirt the very edges of sanity and death on a daily basis, she’d be a babbling mess before her.
Her feet fell onto the grass below her, and a green hand, with vines whipping violently around from it’s forearm reached down to her.
“You’re a long way from where you belong, human.”
She looked up through gritted teeth, and took his hand tightly.
“Condescending much?”
“It’s not condescension. It’s stating the obvious. Welcome to the Verdant Fields.”
The portal opened before him, and Thor leapt out. He didn’t need to breath, and as he hit the surface of the Moon, the dust exploded around him. Hammer at his side, he charged towards the Blue area of the moon, where the great battle raged around him.
Fight the Fight, Thor. Nate had said to him. Fight the fight on the Moon and I will call in every favour I know to prevent the world from collapsing.
His fingers cracked as they wrapped firmly around the hilt of the Hammer, and he swung it with all of his godly strength. The Eternals face exploded through the moon rock, sending huge chunks flying left right and centre, as every bone in the Man-God’s face exploded into fragments.
Black Bolt, costume torn and destroyed crashed into Thor, his eyes wild with anger, and hate as the memes spread through his city. The Eternals crashed through the buildings inside the City of Atilan, whilst the population within it struggled to catch the flying warriors. An entire host had now descended on the city, Gorgon, Karnak and even Crystal fought against the immortal warriors, with tooth and nail and lighting.
As Thor’s hammer cracked into the side of Bolt’s head, the warrior king blinked, and slammed him into the mood dust so hard his outline was cracked into the surface.
Thor was finally seeing why the Gods were so violent, because they were only slightly above the Humans, and they were basically Animals.
Violent, horrid animals.
Nate had to work fast. In order to save the variants, he needed to at least have someone on his side. Someone who knew them well enough – In fact someone from those variants. He took a deep breath, and removed his jacket, folding it up and laying it on the “ground.”
He dove off the edge of the cliff face, his own Telekinesis catching him and guiding him towards his first brain.
He was about to perform existentialism memetic surgery; One Genotype at a time.
The Deviant arm clashed with the Atlantean’s, enormous waves were created on the surface. Death clung to the red waters, as blades cut through blue and black and pink flesh. Heads and arms floated through the water like so much chum, while Deviant and Atlantean met face to face, blade to blade.
Some distance off, within the massive scene something was cutting through the warriors, pushing them apart under the waves. Extendable arms tore through the first waves of Warriors, pushing Deviants onto the floor, as giant Red eyes locked onto the huge walls of Atlantis before it.
It’s mouth opened, as the water took it’s coat up in billows, as underwater winds pulled it around his body. Clear plastic coated the entire humanoid body, showing off its internal components, which blinked and beeped under the waves in binary protestations to the extreme pressures. The Machine that wanted to be a man that wanted to be a machine swung its massive arms into the Atlantean warriors, knocking them to the floor as well.
“DIE, FLESHY ABORTIONS!”
X-49 was here, and unlike his Brothers, he was a complete and utter bastard.
