Frightened Boy - Scott Kelly (ebook reader with android os .txt) 📗

My last sight before we peeled out of sight was Whisper facing the Mal with a gun in her hand, the two of them the last alive.


21. Sun and Moon

Escher rode hard out of Kingwood Forest and into the surrounding brush lands. He took Lux and I out and away from the train tracks and onto a faded trail that’d once been a busy street. It was so worn and cracked at this point that entire sections were impassible and had to be driven around with care.

Now that we were out of Banlo Bay, Escher seemed to relax a bit. He bit into a cigar he’d pulled from the truck and commandeered the jeep with a smile. Lux sat quietly, his headphones pulled over his ears, and simply watched, expressionless, as what used to be Texas passed around him.

So, we’d lost another one. Guts, Grundel, Sam, Mal—maybe Whisper, and of course Erika. I didn’t like my chances for survival very much. I supposed it didn’t matter; I had been dead from the minute I saw the big red spot of blood on Erika’s blouse.

The plains surrounding Banlo Bay were flat and dry, an endless expanse. I thought about my two companions. They had history here. They’d explored, seen the world, and fought in wars.

Well, I had history too. How many rotted logs had I slept in during the Collapse? How many ditches had I hidden in?

Hoped I’d never be back here. Now, everything else I had was gone. If there was any future at all for me, this would be it.

Good riddance, future.

I looked at the back of Escher’s head. This man wanted to destroy Banlo Bay, though I wasn’t sure how. But he was wrong, wasn’t he? There were innocent people in that city. People like I was, weeks ago. Did I want Escher to succeed? If he did have a way to destroy the city, would I try to stop him? Little Brother was there. Little Brother deserved to die, after all. But surely not along with millions more.

Erika, what should I do?

I decided to settle for the second most random decision-maker I could think of. I pulled a coin out of my pocket, a meaningless relic from my old life. Heads, and I would try to save Banlo Bay. Tails, and I'd run the first chance I got.

I flipped it low: heads.

I flipped it again: heads.

Fucking Christ. Give me a break here, Erika.

I flipped it again: heads.

Fuck

*

Escher slowed the jeep to a halt as the sun began to fall on the grassy plains of the Red Zone. Traveling over the dangerous, uneven terrain was uncomfortable, tiring work. We bounced constantly about in the vehicle, each bump taking Escher’s foot off the pedal and crashing it back down. We had been following traces of a highway, but dust and cracks had obscured it for some miles, and we weren’t sure if we had driven off of it or not.

“Do you even remember where it was?” Lux asked Escher.

“Of course,” Escher said. “It will make itself known to me when the time comes.”

“You were delirious when you saw it first,” Lux said. “Maybe you imagined—” he stopped himself, realizing the futility of the argument.

Escher grinned.

“You should give this up,” Lux said. “It isn’t worth it. Besides, I don’t know if I can live with it.”

“You don’t have to live with it,” Escher said. “Only I do, and I think I’m going to enjoy it.”

“What if I try to stop you?” Lux asked.

“Then you’ll get stopped.”

My ears burned with nervousness at the conversation. Was this Project Epoch? I had to know. “So what’s Project Epoch? What are you two talking about?”

Escher turned to me and then looked at Lux. He grinned smugly around the fat cigar in his mouth. “Why don’t we stop here?” Escher said. “It’s been a long day, and I don’t think trying to navigate the jeep over these roads in the dark is going to get us very far.”

Escher pulled the jeep to a stop alongside a tall rocky crag, outside of view—not that it mattered. We hadn’t seen another person since we’d left Kingwood Forest.

An hour later, we found ourselves behind the shelter of the cliff, sitting around a small campfire on a warm night. Lux was cooking cans of dried foods that we’d manage to salvage from a ration pack in the jeep. I didn’t want to think about how ancient the food must be, and my hunger overtook my disgust.

“We might as well kick back and relax.” Escher said. “Frightened Boy, come tomorrow, you and Lux and I will likely be the only human beings alive in a 1,000-mile radius.”

“Why?” I asked instead.

“What do you mean, why? I think the idea is pretty clear at this point.” Escher grinned.

“I get it—reuniting a fractured mind, eliminating the cancer that is Little Brother, but how do you plan on killing everyone?”

“I really can’t tell you that, without telling you how I got here in the first place. Do you want to hear?”

“Yes, very much so,” I answered.

Escher leaned back and looked up at the waning sun and rising moon.


22. Magic Mirror

“The best way I can describe it to you is as a dream. I had a long, long dream that I lived a life in another time. I dreamed about mountains of Italy. I remember learning the seventeen sacred patterns of translational symmetry. I dreamed about the smell of sticky bread and freshly cut wood. I remember coming to America. The last thing I remember is trying to draw Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. I think that may have set this into motion,” the Red King announced.

“What is that?” I asked him.

Escher stared up at the night sky as he spoke, his voice strangely detached. “It’s something a mathematician was working on in my time. It’s mathematical proof that more things will always be true than can be proven—proof that we can’t understand the world around us. Sometimes I can still see the work I used to do. It just appears to me. Like when I saw Whisper, I knew I’d seen her somewhere before. She was from this past dream. So are you, Clark, and you, Lux. You’re all people I once knew, all part of my old life somehow.

“It all used to be so clear to me. As time passes, everything becomes less certain, and it starts to make too much sense. That’s why I take my own blood—it’s recursion. Recursion reminds me of what brought me here. It’s more of the math that made me.

“I woke up in a plain white room. No one was around, and I thought I must be in Heaven. I had no body. I just simply was. I thought I must be going crazy. I’m certain I still am.

“It seemed like weeks. I’d see patterns everywhere I looked, infinite loops climbing up into themselves. First it was my hands, then my body, and soon I was recreated in my entirety. Eventually moebius strips built themselves into lamps, into a bed…

“Reality was like soft clay. I could bend it however I wanted. It became clear to me that I was trapped in my own head. And I wasn’t simply moving things with my mind. I just worked really hard to believe they were a different way, and they would be—at least for a while. The patterns that’d turned themselves into a bed and a lamp continued to develop into carpet, windows, a doorway. I was building the world around me.

“I was here. This reality had begun to construct itself in my mind. The world was taking shape, but almost immediately, things started to go wrong,” Escher said. His speech had picked up speed as events became clearer to him, and now he spoke in hushed, excited tones. " The area around me turned into a military base. I was terrified by what I saw, and that influenced everything around me. I could still see the pattern that bound it all together, but the figures it was making were all sharp, dangerous angles and polygonal pandemonium.

“And then, the first doctor came. He looked so real. I marveled at his skin, still with a few rough parallelograms visible below the surface but mostly looking like the real thing.

“They made me watch television. It was a window into the darkest part of my mind. It said to never trust anyone. Never trust a Stranger. Never help someone in need. Mind your own business. In all that, my own paranoia was made tangible. This is what the television was telling me, but why was it letting me know these things? Why would my own mind want to show them to me? How sick with paranoia was I?

“After a while, a doctor started interviewing me every day for a week, trying to see if I was fully functioning I guess. I didn’t ask. I could see right through him. He was so basic, such a bad facsimile of a living person.

“‘Who are you?’ he’d ask. We sat on either sides of a giant metal table with heavy metal chairs bolted to the floor.

“‘I’m Escher.’ I knew that much. And when I looked at something, I knew how to use it. The television remote, doors, cars, and whatever else I saw was like I’d already known how it worked before. Or, more accurately, I’d just made the entire thing up in my head.

“At the time, I thought asking questions of the doctors would be a waste. I didn’t understand yet that I could unlock information about myself through the world I’d created. I thought it was a stupid, crazy thing to talk to a figment of my own imagination. He wasn’t even fully formed. He had triangles for irises.

“You have to understand, Frightened Boy. All I’ve ever done is make order out of chaos, and now it wasn’t working. My mind was full of chaos, and I had no idea how to make order of it.

“If you can understand what a dream is—I don’t know that—then what would you do? If you knew it wasn’t real. So I picked up the table and bashed his skull in, just to make his image go away,” he said, sighing.

“So your first instinct was to be violent?” I asked.

“I couldn’t…reason with them. I regret it too. I never lifted a finger against a man in my last life, but you have to understand my frustration. But yes, it’s possible that this initial violence set the tone for all of my later encounters.

“I’d built myself into a military base, and everything was locked down. I didn’t care—I’m God. They couldn’t possibly hurt me.

“I walked out into a hallway. Two soldiers had been watching from the glass, and they had seen me kill the doctor. Of course, he was just a part of my imagination, so I wasn't really killing anyone—just erasing an illusion. Winning an argument with myself.

“They met me at the door with rifles raised, ready to kill me. I put a hand on the barrel of