Chloe At Worlds' End
Chapter 10

Chloe had heard the whole conversation between Colin and Charlie, and mostly it only dismayed her even though she was glad that Charlie was still alive and relatively safe. She spoke to Onri

“Onri, could you hear Colin’s conversation with Charlie?”

“Yes I did… I am a little relieved and glad to hear at least some good news… Alessandro, Grog and I are ready now to venture out from here… I think we should go and see if the grid building is accessible, maybe Rajeem is keeping himself hidden there somewhere in its depths”

“Yes, that is a good idea Onri. Please be careful”

Onri felt apprehensive and nervous in just the mere thought of entering that building again, for it now only represented pain and death to him. He bid the others to follow his lead.

“Okay, let’s see if we can make it to the end of this street without being seen, we will be able to see the grid building from there”

They exited their hallway, turned right, and tip toed to the corner. When they peeked around it, they saw that this street was empty of anyone as well… it was eerily quiet. Onri said

“Well, there it is… stay here and I will sprint over there and see if the door is unlocked” They nodded their approval and watched him as he sprinted over and tried the door. Onri grasped the lever, he expected it to be locked, but surprisingly it yielded when he twisted it. He pushed open the door a crack and stuck in his head. Once his eyes adjusted to the dim interior he saw that it was vacant. He looked back and motioned to them across the street, and they quietly closed the door after slipping inside. There was almost no light in there, but Onri remembered the way to the iron Vaulted door which led to the lower levels. They crept quietly but quickly to it and once there, noticed that thankfully it was ajar! They passed through it and proceeded down the industrial steel staircase. A few levels down, Onri and Alessandro recognized the entrance to where they had before fought the grids’ infected computer, but also remembered that these stairs continued on to lower levels, so they kept going. They descended several more levels before reaching the bottom, and by then they were in complete blackness. Onri felt with his foot and found that the ground was level. He inched slowly forward with outstretched hands until he came to a wall. He felt around this way and that until he came to what he felt was a door jamb, then a door handle. He whispered to Grog, who was breathing down his neck

“I’ve found a door…”

Back at the ruins of ‘Charlie’s Boat Shop’, Colin asked Charlie

“Have you been free from the wolves and hiding in here this whole time?”

“Yes, I was lucky to have had a lot of packaged food and water here… but I’m afraid it’s now all gone and I’m literally starving” Colin hopped up onto what was left of the window sill and peered out.

“My mission at this time is only reconnaissance until we can form a plan from what we have learned, so I must again take to the sky. Do you want me to see if the coast is clear for you to venture out to forage for something to eat?”

“Yes, thank you. That would help me… but I would also like to help in any way that I can”

“Okay, then wait here while I go take a look and I will be back shortly”

Colin sprang to the air and circled above the ruins. He could still see the work groups of slaves amid the torches from the direction which he came, but it looked quiet outwards beyond this point, so he circled back and landed again upon the sill.

“It presently looks pretty quiet beyond this place, care to leave now?”

“Yes, I really must… I’m weak from hunger”

“Okay, do you mind if I hitch a ride on your shoulder for now?”

“Yes, that’s fine Colin. I welcome the company, as I have been alone for a long time now and starting to lose my mind, ha ha!”

“You poor thing, okay let’s go”

Charlie knew that they still had a few hours left of this relatively dark night time amid the emergency lighting before the fusion orb returned to start a new day, otherwise he certainly wouldn’t be outside now. He picked his way stealthily from one wrecked building to the next. Once they were in a residential neighborhood, he went into a house that seemed abandoned like all the rest. He said

“I will go to the kitchen and see if there is anything to eat”

After rummaging around in the pantry, he sat at the kitchen table and consumed the contents of the many containers he had found. When he finished the last one he belched loudly, reverberatingly, as he tossed the empty can over his shoulder and smiled mischievously at a shocked Colin standing there upon the table, who said

“Ah… thank you for that, I take it you’re feeling quite better now?”

“Very, thank you…”

“Well that is good. I think it is time for me to get back to work aloft in scouting for any suspicious happenings… you’re welcome to trail me from the ground if you still wanted to help”

“Yes, I definitely want to help… I mean, what are my alternatives… doing nothing and living like this or worse for the rest of my life? I’d rather be dead… let’s go”

Colin again took to the sky and circled about in assuring the coast was clear as they went. If something looked threatening, Colin would only need alert Charlie of the necessity to hide.

They had gone only a short distance when they came upon the ruins of Chloe and Onri’s totally obliterated house. There was really nothing left of it other than splintered planks of wood and fractured bits of brick, which was all in piles here and there no higher than ones’ ankle, amid a myriad of crushed and wrecked sky freighters which littered the area. As Charlie shuffled along through the debris, he happened to notice some kind of a sparkly object within the dust which caught his eye. It looked intriguing and pretty, so he stopped and picked it up.

Immediately he screamed in pain as a kind of intense electric current shocked his entire body, which immobilized him into a petrified stance of knotted muscle spasms. Colin was mortified… he felt he had failed his friend by not noticing and warning him to stay clear of that eerie trinket. But in truth, they had both noticed it at the same instant. Colin lamented as he notified Chloe

“Oh Chloe, I’m afraid I have let our cover be blown. Charlie has stumbled upon some obvious trap in the ruins of your old house… and he is frozen there in some kind of electrified torture!”

But before Chloe could respond, Colin cut her off

“Oh my god, something is happening… it’s him… he is coming!”

Colin flew off to put some distance between his self and the familiar congealing, thickening purple clouds. As he flapped heartily, he looked over his shoulder… the Rajeem-wolf-thing eye was materializing… and it was still as terrifying to behold as before. Once fully formed, it seemed nothing escaped its attention. It squinted and scrutinized Colin as he frantically flew off, and it looked down hatefully at Charlie standing there in petrified agony. When Colin was quite a distance away, he landed in a tree to catch his breath and watch what could happen. He said

“Chloe… the eye is there… it’s just hovering over Charlie. And it saw me, so now it knows me… but it’s still just hovering there… as if it’s waiting for something”

“Yes Colin, I think he is doing just that… waiting to flush me out. He is hopeful that I will come to Charlie’s aid”

“Oh Chloe… what shall we do… Charlie is in such pain!”

“I’m left with no choice… I must come to his aid”

As Sissy followed those two frightful things, she tried to stay close enough in order to hear anything that they might say. But something else was happening as well, she began to notice that the entire misty sky of her home was taking on a violet color… which had never happened before. The two wolf-things stopped when they also noticed it, and stood gazing upwards, pointing. The sky continued its transformation, ominously darkening and thickening. The entire sky was now a dark, roiling purple maelstrom. And a brusque wind was picking up and getting quite violent at that. Sissy was surprised to see the wolves were then cowering from it as they tried to duck for protection. Then all hell broke loose. The most violent, deadly lightning storm the likes any creature upon the earth had certainly ever seen before, began wreaking total wanton destruction. Nothing was being spared as fierce winds downed the tallest trees, which had stood for centuries untouched. Continuous thick bolts of lightning also struck them, exploding them into flying splinters with earsplitting, deafening cracks.

Sissy uncontrolledly screamed in terror as she tried to find some nonexistent cover. Through the melee she hollered to Chloe

“Chloe… this place is being totally obliterated with destruction. All life here will be destroyed… HELP!” Chloe felt pure panic as she sat there frozen in indecision upon Mr. Carpet near the dark cave ceiling where she had been waiting. This was it, Rajeem was playing his hand. She had to now act immediately whether she was ready to or not. She pleaded to Mr. Carpet

“Mr. Carpet, take us to Colin and Charlie!”

They sped there with a fantastic speed. As they approached, there was no escaping the piercing scrutiny of the eye as it watched them approach. The moment that it unleashed it’s fury at her in a burst of red, blinding plasma, Chloe felt a realization of sick dread… she had forgotten in her excitement to raise her corona of a shield! She did so just in time as it hit her, but not in time to save Mr. Carpet! She watched in horror beneath her knees as he screamed in pain and burned to a crisp! She had failed him… she felt sick and vomited as she used her staffs’ power to take to the sky. The blinding flash of the stream was still trained upon her as it surged around her violet corona. She held herself steady in the sky before the eye and aimed her staff at it. Its own violet stream of energy shot forth towards it and added to the intensity as the opposing streams exploded in fury. But it was having no effect… they were both equally shielded. She held that position for a few moments. Then she started to feel that her corona was withering… some tickling needles of pain were creeping to her skin, and it was rapidly intensifying! She couldn’t win here… she was bodily exposed here while Rajeem was not, he was still safely hidden away someplace. She would have to retreat… immediately. At least she was still alive to continue the fight, all was not yet lost. She said

“Mother, we need your help… can you collect myself, Colin, Charlie, and Sissy back to your location?”

Within the space of a second or two, that is where they all found themselves… standing in the center of the attic. Chloe burst into tears and sank to her knees.

“Everyone, I must tell you that Mr. Magic Carpet has been destroyed…” There was a collective gasp, followed by silence. Chloe went on

“I am so sorry… I can’t help but feel that it was partly my fault…” Mother comforted her

“You are certainly not to blame, Chloe. Please let your mind be eased over the matter. We will mourn for our friend at the earliest possible moment… but right now we must stay focused”

Chloe looked to Charlie standing there amongst them and asked

“Hello Charlie, you looked in sorry shape just before we left there, are you still in pain?”

“Hi Chloe, It’s nice to see you again. Umm, I think I’m alright now… but, what is this place… where are we?”

Chloe felt an overwhelming need for some fresh air, she said

“The others here will fill you in… my mind is in a frazzle just now. I need some fresh air and some time to reflect… things have spun out of control and still nothing is resolved, I will be outside for a while”

She exited the house as quick as possible. She felt nervously sick. She wandered into the foliage alongside the house and was soon among the many blooms of roses. She meandered there for a while to try and calm her nerves. The sun felt pleasantly warm on her face, and she closed her eyes as she parked her nose against a fluffy, silky yellow rose. The airy, perfumed scent was very grounding for her mind, and she lingered there for a time as she smelled a few of them. She felt much better… her stomach no longer felt a flutter. She decided to walk to the top of that little hill of before that was over the gorge, and used her staff as a walking stick along the way. Once there she sat with her back against the rock and placed the staff across her lap. It was a beautiful afternoon, sliding into dusk. It was almost impossible to believe such carnage was taking place back home as she sat in this perfectly peaceful place. The sound of the gorge cleansed and calmed her mind as butterflies flitted here and there. Sparkling sunlight was filtering through the trees from across the gorge as the sun inched lower on the hidden horizon. It still felt warm upon her face and eyelids as she closed her eyes.

She needed to think about how to neutralize all of these simultaneous calamities which were taking place. Rajeem was doing it all as he had himself safely tucked away someplace. Well, why couldn’t she also have some control of the same effects…? She was also in possession of a crystal of the same powers.

It was time to slip herself back into Mother’s realm of evolutional genetic memory and collective consciousness. But felt great trepidation in doing so, for she could encounter Rajeem there… just waiting for her. She had sensed before that there were many more secrets to learn from this crystal upon her lap. She raised and touched it to her temple. The warmth of the sunlight, still upon her eyelids, felt comforting. Then… slowly… she wasn’t sure if it was an effect of the crystal, but that quantum energy of the sun began to permeate her being. She could feel every individual cell in her body soaking it in… sharing and distributing it… until she was completely saturated. It then began to open itself up to her as a possible conductor of transportation! She willed her consciousness to free itself from her body… and to attach to it. She caught her breath. She was now almost matter-less as she combined with its flow of quarks and neutrons, and modulated herself onto a wave of light and sped off! Time for her seemed to have stopped… or it was speeding her off to infinity… she couldn’t tell which, but she now felt herself apart from it. And spacial distances for her seemed almost irrelevant… as she was now limited only by her new speed of light. As she shot above the earths’ atmosphere, she could see the whole planet… floating there in its’ gravity well upon the warped fabric of space, tilted and spinning in its loneliness.

And the sun was there… nurturing as it unrelentingly drenched everything with its streams of plasma, including x-rays which could permeate matter. She then attached herself to those, changed course dizzyingly, and shot back towards the earth… sinking herself into it. Flowing… flowing… through and into all of its matter. She touched, caressed, and savored each individual atom as she went by and through all of them. It was delicious, intoxicating, and completely rapturous… and it also seemed there were no longer any secrets… only answers! The recorded evolutional genetic memories throughout time on this planet played out before her as she encountered and touched each and every living genome. Then she saw that she could travel backwards in time through these memories… and she jumped at the chance without hesitation. But it took time, very similar to how a computer would be affected by the limitations of its own processing speed and available bandwidth to the information. But her mind did go there at the fixed velocity of its limitations. Along the way she was able to witness the evolution of all living matter upon the earth, albeit in reverse. There was no microbe which didn’t escape her observance. And throughout every atom of every strand of DNA that existed, there was consciousness at the subatomic level.

She saw that conscious awareness and communication between genomes was possible depending upon how close each one was in similarity to the other. The farther away one was to the other in how its DNA was built and sequenced, resulted in it being on a different plane all together. For instance a tree was conscious, aware, and in communication with all other trees near it… and any other genome close enough to its’ own genetic make-up would also put it on the same communicably conscious plane, such as a bush or a shrub. Chloe marveled at the information which just flowed to her like water to a drain, willingly and unobstructed.

She also saw how it was possible that Rajeem was using this mode of transportation to funnel his consciousness, perception, and will through the mist to any location, and how he could unleash the crystals power through this funnel as well.

She felt that she could stay there forever, marveling. As she looked this way or that, or peered closer at anything, subatomic secrets would just tattle on themselves. All of the discoveries that man had made in science involved eons of waiting… waiting to firstly evolve to the point of just being able to understand theoretical physics, and then more… more frustratingly fruitless and fruitful years of painstaking work by countless men and women in pondering their ideas over arguments, chalk boards, experiments, and dead ends. It now seemed to Chloe as a preposterous, cynical, and flabbergasting trifle of a joke… played on humankind by some gate keeper with his knotted arm firmly holding the control of it closed.

But who was the gatekeeper? It seemed easy for Chloe, through her eyes as a human herself, to want to assign a type of human inspired ego to this role. So she reasoned to herself, if she felt a small level of comfort in doing this to initially make sense of it personally… then she would call him or her… time. Good old Father… or Mother Time. Her journey to the time of the beginnings of life on the planet was now complete… and the surface was covered completely by oceans. As she encompassed and permeated the entirety of it through its conductivity, she connected her mind to those single celled microbes which were there. But they also had their own histories… her journey was not yet complete… maybe it never would be.

She was afraid to explore those further… where would it take her? Likely off planet, or even out of the galaxy she thought… could she get trapped somewhere without the means to return?

It had taken her considerable time and energy to get here and she couldn’t guarantee that a return journey would ever happen again… so nervously, she enveloped those primordial microbes into her consciousness... and leapt! She followed their genetically recorded evolution further back through time… but it quickly led to origins that would take her off planet as she had suspected. It seemed a futile folly in trying to link these microbes to any others in space as being from any specific comet or planet… it would be a blind search. But none the less, she was intrigued by the thought… so she again affixed herself to an errant light beam and flowed with it into outer space.

As she looked down again at the earth, and all around her as she went, she saw that traveling backwards through time was only a matter of following the light from any given star. As she gazed around, she quickly surmised which was the most distant, dim, and oldest, and modulated herself onto its rays. Once inside its energy, she peered towards its source and followed it… marveling that it was possible for her to flow backwards against its direction of propagation. She was in a stream of photons. They collided with her, and flowed around her as she streamed along. Her view of the solar system was fascinating she thought, as she passed Neptune. She then realized the folly of thinking that she could in any significant way travel back in time towards this far off primordial star. Even at her present speed of light, it would take billions of light years. She then thought of faster than light travel which everyone in old Sanctum did every day, using ‘spooky action’ or ‘entanglement’ derived from quantum physics. So… she accessed her double at the other end of this beam near that far off star… and she was there!

Her consciousness was now billions of years into the past. She halted her movement and hovered there in that quiet, cold vacuum. She wasn’t sure what she was even doing here now, other than satisfying her own curiosity. The star was just before her… and she also noticed as she looked around that there weren’t any more of them. But there were a lot of gaseous nebulae expanding out from where she was. Was this the beginning of their universe? It most likely was, she thought. It was then that she started to feel that she wasn’t there alone!

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