Moho (Part One: Rise of a Symbol) (22 page)

“Navees just don’t get us humans, do they? All they crave is creation, creation, creation… Silly creatures. But we are more complicated, aren’t we? We have more than nine needs… needs they don’t even know about. Maya doesn’t understand. She never will. But I do, Moho. I know what you need. And I can give it to you. You’re longing for it, I can feel it. Come on Moho, no one is looking,” she says and walks back around before she pushes her body against mine. I awake and push her away as hard as I can.

“Yes, Moho! There is the temperament I love so much about you. You want me too, don’t you?”

“I feel sorry for you. To be honest, yes, I did consider your offer for a moment. The selfish part of me realizes that without all of those people judging me, I would be free. I could be myself entirely. But what you don’t understand is that it’s not only about one’s own freedom. One’s personal freedom stops when it diminishes the freedom of someone else. You fail to realize that revenge is only one of many needs. And most needs require other people to satisfy them. You can’t satisfy your need for social contact if you’re alone. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a part of
yourself to benefit the community you live in. You coldly switch out hundreds of people just so that you can be who you think you want to be. You pretend you don’t need anyone but you’re lying to yourself. You want to be in an intimate relationship but you will never have one if you’re unwilling to change your behavior to benefit this relationship you're looking for. I mean, look at what you’ve done! You harmed hundreds of people just so that you could be with someone you think is like you. But you know what? I’m not like you. No one is like you. No one is like me. No one is like anyone. You are unique and so am I and so is everyone around us. I understand this desire to overcome your own individuality by connecting with another person. Everyone wants that, even Maya. But this here, how you have tried it, Pax, is not how it works,” I say. That felt good.

Silence. Her delusional vigor fades visibly. She is as emotional as she was at the beginning of our conversation when she touched her bellybutton. I hit a nerve and she knows it. Unfortunately, not much time passes until her selfishness takes control of her once more.

“You know that all of this here is your fault, don’t you? I did this for you. You tricked me in MNOP and I wouldn’t have had to hurt a single one of those people if you had done what we had agreed upon and had published your memory as well. I trusted you and you misused my trust,” she argues.

“And you know that you never had my actual Bellybutton Erasure memory. You never had proof that I was human. All that memory showed was that I pushed you off this branch. And nothing happened to you. I even jumped myself. It was all just fun. You made it serious when you brought
your actual Bellybutton Erasure memory into MNOP. It’s your fault," I counter. “Come on, Pax. It’s over. You’ve lost. End this now and wake them up.”

She starts laughing hysterically. “Oh my Spring! Do you actually think I will give them back their conscience?”

“There is no point in holding them hostage any longer,” I say calmly.

“You can’t think clearly. Your mind is still occupied by those navees. Let me speed up their decay. That will teach you to love me!”

She turns around towards the hundreds of sleeping navees and lowers her head. Maybe this horrific sight will bring her back to sanity. She seems paralyzed and I’m about to give her more words of support when the situation takes a turn for the worse. One by one, the people are pulled up from the ground, their eyes still shut. But their rise doesn’t stop once they are back on their feet. Pax mentally connected to their uniforms. The formerly soft fabric appears completely rigid and lifts all people into the air. Their arms are stretched our horizontally to the side, kept up by their stiff sleeves. Nothing is supporting their heads and so they all hang loosely from their necks, swinging left to right as Pax is having trouble keeping this many people in midair. She is in way over her head but she tries to conceal it when she turns back around and grins at me. Then all the uniforms holding up the people start to move sideways, to the left towards the cliff. She is going to let them drop into the ocean!

“Stop it!” I yell and follow her.

“There is no Aleeya here to save you this time, is there?” she shouts and tries to laugh but she can’t conceal the crushing effort it takes to control all those uniforms and the heavy bodies inside. And before we reach the cliff, the first people drop to the ground. She feels it and gets even angrier, which leads to more people dropping to the ground. I can hear her breathing heavily and it doesn’t take long until she loses control of her last hostage. She is totally exhausted, gasping for air.

“Oh! Thank The Spring!” I exclaim in
relief.

“Don’t rush it,” she says and takes more deep, loud breaths before she adds, “I have enough energy for one more.”

I observe the people on the ground behind her but none of them move. Then I see two small feet flying past my eyes. I look up and right at Maya’s closed eyes and her dangling head. I immediately reach out to grab her feet but Pax pulls her up even higher into the air and quickly moves her over the cliff. Now Maya is hanging in midair, the ocean below her. I stretch my body as far as I can without falling off the cliff but she is out of my reach. Pax is breathing so hard by now that I’m afraid she will lose conscience herself any second.

“Let go off her!” I shout at Pax.

“Exactly,” she says, takes another deep breath, and drops to the ground. Maya’s uniform immediately sags and she rushes towards the ocean. I try to take control of her uniform but I haven’t learned how to do that yet! Next, I try her body but I know that doesn’t work because it’s impossible to mentally connect to someone else’s body. Then I notice something else that is in her uniform. She is carrying a Glowing Stone under her top and I’m able to pull her up by connecting to the small stone under her uniform. It is exhausting and it looks terrible. Her stomach, pulled up by the stone under her top, is coming up first, her head, arms and legs are dangling in the wind. After a draining few minutes she is close enough so that I can grab her light body and pull her back onto the safety of Center Island. She is still unconscious and I’m not far from it myself. I’m about to rest next to Maya when I notice with panic that Pax is gone! No one is standing. Maybe she has fallen unconscious as well. I could barely pull up one person and she held up hundreds. I sit back down next to Maya and take her hand. She is still breathing, her heart is still beating.

Suddenly a high-pitched scream numbs my ears. First I think it’s in my head, that Pax is starting some mental attack, but when I press my hands against my ears, the scream fades. She is torturing someone and now I see who. Aziz is crawling around the ground nearby the temple. Pax is leaning against a pile of Icestones, barely able to keep her eyes open. She looks at Aziz in delight. He is pressing his hands against his ears and screams and yet I can’t hear why he is covering his ears. Except for his screams, Center Island is silent. I shake him and try to wake him up but he doesn’t respond. He simply keeps on screaming. His face is warped in agony. So I decide to do something no one is ever supposed to do but Pax is doing it and I don’t see another way to help him. I break into his mind
and into his CEBOS, to see what he is seeing.

In a blink of an eye, I find myself in a space that I had heard about in some session but I had somehow never gone to myself. I’m in
Aziz’s Imaginationweb. And so is Pax.

The Imaginationweb is a bit different compared to the other spaces in CEBOS. It is basically a slim, vertical cylinder with brightly glowing Essencestrings running from left to right, back and forth and from the ceiling all the way down to the bottom, forming one giant, confusing web. At the bottom of the Imaginationweb, there is a cloud, an Imaginationcloud, showing what Aziz is imagining right now. He thinks dozens of sound waves are pointed directly at him and follow him wherever he crawls. Doesn’t he realize that what he sees is not real? How can there be sound waves without a source? Anyway, he thinks he is being tortured by a seemingly unbearably loud sound. For him it’s real.

Pax, who is standing at the bottom of the Imaginationweb, seems to cause his pain and that needs to stop. If he loses all his energy and Essenchi because of this torture, his essence will leave his body and Pax wins. So I make my way down to her, but it’s difficult. The Essencestrings are flexible and almost impossible to walk or even stand on. Wherever two or more strings cross, there is a Thoughttree, a Memorybubble, or an older Imaginationcloud. All those thoughts, memories, and older mental images are connected by the web of Essencestrings. According to the designers of CEBOS, whatever one imagines is based on old memories, thoughts, or other mental images. It is normal that some of them detach themselves from the web of Essencestrings and fall into the currently forming Imaginationcloud. But Pax is manipulating this process. She is standing on one Essencestring close to the Imaginationcloud at the bottom. With one hand she holds onto an Essencestring to not fall into the Imaginationcloud herself and with her other hand she tears little Thoughttrees and Memorybubbles off the web of Essencestrings and throws them into the Imaginationcloud. She takes Aziz’s negative memories and thoughts of sound, volume, torture, and pain to fuel the ever increasing Imaginationcloud. I’m getting close to her but she sees me, stops the torture and climbs all the way from the center of the Imaginationweb to the mesh forming the walls of the Imaginationweb. Without all the negative thoughts and memories, Aziz’s imagined torture stops and the cloud turns black. He is probably asleep again. Good.

Pax is leaning against the wall. She is sweaty, breathing heavily
, and having trouble keeping her eyes open. It’s possible that she may fall asleep any minute.

“What are you trying to do here? Aziz hasn’t done anything to you,” I argue.

“I'm doing this for us. He hasn’t done anything to anyone. His reputation is pristine. That is the whole point,” she says and needs to pause for a moment. She wipes sweat of her forehead and adds, “We are going to create mental images more terrifying than the worst nightmare… a night terror. I made him think The Spring disappeared and that I tortured him. Now you go ahead and give him another round of torture. When he wakes up he will think this night terror was a prophecy and that we are the ones who will cause the last Spring to disappear and spread terror around Persadia. He will share this night terror with all of his navee friends. And we will become known as the cruelest torturers Persadia has ever known. We will become famous as the creators of The Third Dark Time. We will destroy this planet. It's going to be awesome and our reign hasn’t even begun.”

“I’m obviously not going to do that but I’m glad to hear you will wake them up.”

“You leave me no choice. You haven’t felt the rejection I have endured all those cycles. But soon you will and then you will join me,” she says, almost to herself, like a mantra.

Now she turns towards the mesh making up the wall behind her and pushes her fists against it until it bursts. There is a narrow slit in the mesh now. She grabs the sides of the hole and tears the mesh further apart until it’s big enough for her to walk through it. But instead of disappearing in the wall she climbs back towards the dark, empty Imaginationcloud and starts throwing Memorybubbles and Thoughttrees into it once more. Soon Aziz is imagining another round of torture but he doesn’t press his hands against his ears this time. No, this time he is imagining that Pax is forcing soil down his mouth and nose. She makes it look like she has connected to the soil he is sitting on and makes him believe she is pushing it into his body openings, threatening to suffocate him. Aziz is panicking and tries
to cover his nostrils and mouth with his hands but Pax is squeezing the dirt through his fingers. It’s a terrifying view even though I know it’s not real.

Pax turns her head towards the hole in the wall she made earlier and suddenly doubles of Aziz come pouring out of the hole - his emotions. But none of them are positive. All of his Emotionclones are either fear, terror, alarm or panic and they walk straight into the Imaginationcloud, exponentially increasing his misery.

I try to reach her to stop fueling this night terror with more negative thoughts, memories, and emotions. But before I can reach her, the last bit of remaining energy leaves Pax. She slips off the shaky Essencestring she is standing on, and falls down into the Imaginationcloud out of sight. She is gone but it’s not over. The emotions keep pouring into the Imaginationcloud, with or without Pax. I look into his fear-ridden face and that’s when it hits me. I remember what he said to me last night in his Dreamspace. Nightmares can be fought with hope and I realize that I’ve seen what he needs right now in his Dreamspace as well. One of his biggest dreams was that new Springs appear on Persadia. Pax has already made him believe that The Spring is gone so I have to make him believe there are at least two Springs. I look around and actually find a little Memorybubble that contains The Spring. But I need another one and I think I see the bright glow of The Spring in one of the Memorybubbles above my head. I can’t reach it from the bottom of the Imaginationweb where I’m standing. So I tightly hold on to the one Memorybubble in my hand and make my way across the elastic web to the other Memorybubble that I need to hopefully end Aziz’ suffering. When I reach for it, I have to let go off the last Essencestring I'm holding on to. I'm now balancing on the elastic Essencestring high above the ground. Several Essencestrings cross where the second Memorybubble is attached to the web and I have to pull really hard to rip it off the web. When I finally do, I lose all connection to the web and fall down into the Imaginationcloud. I have both Memorybubbles, each in one hand. I fall right through the Imaginationcloud and feel how half of my body hits Pax who is still lying there and my other half hits the soft mesh. I’ve lasted longer than anyone else but now all my energy is depleted as well. I fall unconscious.