The Altonevers (49 page)

“
The endlessly rippling
event horizon, we're getting close to Central,” he answers. The
wavelengths frequency increases into minute long vast vacillations
as the bus screams silently through the ether. Blue shifting the
cardinal chromosphere path purple as they near, with each
intensifying ripple rising into perfectly vertical walls of
standing space nearly seamless from the vapid vacuum of volume
existing outside the window. The slight stone blue opalescence
shaping the shortening peaks and valleys of the waves, becomes so
vast and close they seem to either vanish into open space or become
it.
Deep in the distance are the tiny
glowing lights of superstructures as small as speckle, of a single
universal fiber fabricating into fulgent filaments. Along with
millions of other filaments forming the fibers of even greater
supercluster threads continually woven into ever more immense webs.
That shrink to her eye to be thin as a human hair, and another set
of thread grows as millions more emerge and shrink in a repeating
cycle of continually enlarging and furthering fractal filament
structures. Trillions of these glistering threads are weft together
until a single sheet of versicolor space-time fabric emerges with
each thread of the film containing all the frequencies of the known
multiverses.

The pulsing synapses that thrive
through each thread, increase in number, and amplitude. More and
more of them are marbling through the sheet of space-time fabric
aglow against an all enveloping dark matter backdrop. The sheet
begins shrinking in size, compressing to resemble a strip of cell
membrane. Its entirety aligning with a second sheet slithering
through open space, overlapping and amplifying each other’s
celestially threaded patterns. Then a third, another, and a fifth,
to an eighth sheet, and repeatedly multiplying until there's
millions of them converging, but never touching. Conforming into
overlapping layers, and aligning into a lattice structure of
superstructure stratum continually compressing into a single
translucent sheet.

A single sheet of the
space-time stratum is as though a nanometer thick, a Planck length
apart from the next and varying from gigaparsecs to tetraparsecs in
length and height. The multitude of translucent space-time sheets
of marbled multiversal membranes are aligning to resemble slices of
mineral assemblage. Merging and melding into a single magnificently
radiating foliated massive habit mineral of metastable energy. The
base of the single panchromatic space-time mineral is submerged,
standing at the edge of a white hot ocean of photons flowing like
rough winded water waves through instant cycles of annihilation and
amalgamation. Forever fusing into an immeasurably large protean
body of astral mass as unlimited shades of churning white light
miming the fluid movements of the open ocean for as far as can ever
be seen.
The surface waves of the ocean of
perpetual annihilation are battering the base of the supercelestial
crystalline structure like hurricane waves rage around a lone
lighthouse. Causing reverberations through each multiversal sheet
as waves of causality, stimulating change on such a scope it can
only be understood by the space-time sheet's inhabitants as the
passage of time.

The supercelestial crystals grow more
numerous and more magnificent in their pupil illuminating lustrous
splendor and size. Gradually amassing into greater more intricate
foliated membrane minerals that cleave the white light ocean with
their massive abstract shapes. Each standing against the sea like
icebergs glowing from the inside outward like a soul glows through
a person’s eyes. As the two continue in their astronomic approach,
the glimmering waves of varying white winnowing energy intensifies
exponentially, increasing in magnitude by centuries compared to a
second, per passing second. If a second is the scale of the entire
known universe, a single mother of pearl wave is now a millennium
high and the ocean is of a million of years span so far, and
continually expanding by the blink of an eye. All of it, the scene
they're sailing though on the prominence bridge, is minuscule in
comparison to the source from which the endless quanta of energy is
emanating. A rupture greater in scale than all eternities ever
known, though is only a pin sized hole in the incalculable
existence of Central.

Central, the grandest intersection of
all the InterAltonevers, with trillions more than trillions of
interceding crystalline amber rails visible from any point in time.
Looking like tinsel tangling and untangling as streaks of lightning
massive and miniscule, resembling synapses firing into every
direction of space at once, with most becoming binary and imitating
the helical strands of DNA just before disappearing into a mind
stopping unknowably immaculate, unblemished, immense, unseeable,
boundless black sphere. The center of any conception of infinity to
ever be conceived, seamlessly coexisting with its antithesis,
oblivion, as a single eternally existing entity. An infinitely
persisting singularity of unfathomable possibilities persisting as
a netherless nadir of a nihilist's nightmare.

The two eventually after hours more of
sailing the energy annihilating white sea’s come close enough to
touch the skin of the forbidden field. An invisible field where no
energy but what spills from the rupture that’s releasing reality
itself as an ocean below them, may ever pass. Instantly Anna, Cider
and the rest of the partially pulverized passengers soundlessly
atomize entirely out of perceivable existence.

Soul penned
station

“
SUNNY WARM BEACHES,” she
sees upon cognizance. Staring at a colorful poster print with blue
skies and a beach, though standing in an InterAlto station that
smells like things. In front of a ten foot by ten foot square
filled with an infinitely layered holographic map of the
InterAltonevers in its entirety. The two are next to each other and
next to a turtle faced attendant encased in a thick glassed ticket
booth, who's speaking softly into a microphone that's amplifying
and distorting her voice into incoherent hollers. Shouting over an
unending flood of feet mechanically marching on the other side of a
rusting black iron gate spaced by cobwebbed turnstiles. Separating
the two from a rushing river of apparitions forming one fluidly
moving body that fills the volume of a white and blue tiled tunnel
from wall to wall without spilling a drop through the spaces of
rust wrought gates. Their passing murmurs collect into a single
wale of incessantly echoing sorrow as their spectral heads and
shoulders are rising and falling in a rhythm resembling a surface
waves of white water river of ethereal light.

This is just one of many entries to
the tiled tunnel catacombs of a subterranean super system
interconnected by stations and escalators and stairways. Designed
after the pathways and chambers of an ant colony, more likely, it
is where the ants picked up the habit. The flow of bodiless lament
perpetually gushes a thousand people passing her eye per second and
purging to their proper platforms for soul placement by the sort of
authority.

“
Uh...what exactly is
that?” she asks.

“
It's one of the ghostly
streams of soul penned station, where souls are siphoned off to
their stations, to then arrive at their new stations of
reincarnation, repurposed, recycled, to replenish the other side,
or whatever,” he says.

“
We're dead?” she
asks.

“
No this is just where we
got off. They’re dead, or without physical bodies at the moment,
would be a little more on the nose,” he says.

“
Is it predetermined?” she
asks.

“
I don’t know, I mean I
don't think so. It's more like scooping a handful from a flood
passing through your fingers. Can you tell exactly what part of the
water will be in your palms?” he asks.

“
I guess not. Or it's as
simple people going about their lives,” she says.

“
Eh, either
way.”

The woman in the booth presses her
turtle face to the scratchy glass, fogging it with bullishly
breathing steam seething nostrils. She starts shouting into her
microphone that squawks gargling static into the damp underground
mildewed air.

“
What do you think she's
saying?” She asks.

“
Who knows, you
ready?”

“
I think so,” she
says.

“
If you go under don’t
hold your nose, you can still breathe, okay?” he says.

“
Okay,” she
nods.

“
You'd be surprised how
many people die that way,” he says.

“
Huh, suffocating
themselves in the souls of others,” she says rubbing her chin a
bit.
The tremors of a train passing
somewhere nearby shakes black dust from the bowed ceiling down to
neon yellow grime covering the walls to an iridescent green. They
sprint toward the gates and hurdle through the thick dusty cobwebs
of the turnstile. Anna gets her foot caught and stretches forward,
diving into the side of the rapid river of wrathful wraiths wailing
in woeful waves, swept a thousand feet submerged in what feels like
a sense muffling, fluidly moving perspective blur of very heavy
gusts of warm air.
She holds her breath
for almost a minute, watching the tersely turning translucent
undercurrents she’s is the rushing grips of. Cider nearly loses his
coat rolling head over heels sideways, and gasping for air below
the swells of heads and shoulders. She’s almost suffocating herself
to save herself from drowning in what is actually easily
breathable. Swirling and swooshing through twists and turns,
declines and inclines, up stairs and down. At times the tunneled
tide tosses them at ten times their height up the walls to splash
down and be swept away through continually splitting, splintering
and snaking caverns.

The two struggle to tumble toward each
other, and she stretches out from a cannonball, taking a minute to
pounce on him and wrap her arms around him like a wildcat. They
roll in a ball through the eddies and whirlpools of an unending
labyrinth not meant to be known by any form of energy that would be
in its tumultuously twisting Coriolis undercurrents.

“
Are you alright?” He
shouts through the muffling of passing souls.

“
Yes,” she replies as a
blurb of bubbles. They swim to the surface to hear one another
through the wailing of the flowing fluid faces filling their
ears.

“
Are you okay?” he asks
still having to shout.

“
Yeah.”

“
Fun, huh.”

“
Not too bad.”

“
Right,” he
says.

“
Right,” she
agrees.

“
No, Right!”

“
Right?”

“
No! Anna, to the right,
lean to the right,” Cider yells.

“
Oh! Shit!,” she yells, as
a split in the tunnel quickly nears. They swim in opposite
directions though not letting go of each other. Slamming into the
wall with a thud and rolling against mossy tiles of the lefter
path. Flushing through tunnels of vesper velocity and leaning
together to choose their path through the vapid channels of the
endless abyss of paling the underworld of Pluto's
creation.

A bright shining light,
like day peeking through clouds, grows in glow as it comes closer
to them. And before either can scream, a flash of brilliant color
blinds them the instant they're ejected from a subway station’s
stairs. Soaring twenty feet into the open air riding a rush of
souls, dispersing under them like water, splashing onto a lustrous
black four lane street, sliding over an equally black sidewalk,
each reflecting vibrant blurs of even the slightest light that
comes to touch them. Then crashing to the corner of a pale yellow
building and washing with the stream of specters and screams
ascending seven hundred feet up its side, then staying suspended
for a second or a few while sitting still in the sky.
The atmosphere of Central, whose every floating
particle is visible and is collectively illustrating the currents
and eddies, as particle path like jet streams, of the ambient
moving through itself. Filling the volume of the sky with variances
in shade by the spin of each particularly hued particle of passing
atmosphere. Presently rendering a spectra of orange particles
oscillating in a body of themselves, and composing the color of the
ambient throughout the sunless ether around them. The two are high
above the vibrating variegated particles of the building’s yellow
stone face visibly dancing in shades of fluorescence, but never
break the right angles and curves of its mason measured
shape.

The wailing stream of souls
dissipates as it falls and separates fluidly splashing to the
ground Creating outward rolling ebbing circles of bending blacktop
resembling drops of water rippling through a still pond. The two in
the few seconds of stark silence overlooking Central’s eternal city
from a bird’s eye view, seeing the acervate splendor of the
infinite cityscape’s incessantly shifting skylines resembling lunar
light sliding over shallow surface water waves. Endless grids of
blacktop streets and avenues radiating vitreous blurs of any light
to even slightly touch their fluidly undulating surfaces. Lucidly
contrasting the variable oranges of the visibly vaporous
sky.
The ground splits and ripples around
anything it touches. Splashing about the bottoms of trees and
poles, parting into wakes around the wheels of automobiles. Each
footstep of the people passing propagates outward in near perfect
circles flowing in proportion to lightness of one’s foot. While
maintaining its own fluidly fluctuating flow forever in mellifluous
motion, and rolling the reflections of the slightest shapes and
lightest color that fill Central's everlasting cityscape. The
obsidian sidewalks eternally lap against the foundations of the
city's fluorescent, and mineral shapes and structures.