Radiance. Pure, crystalline, everlasting. A blanket of nothingness stretching from the corners of the universe to the center of everything that was inconceivable. It was both hot and cold, thick and thin, a living contradiction where no things should live at all. Horatia saw the white, touched the white, inhaled the white, her eyes, hands, and lungs unsure of what she was supposed to be feeling. Everything was gone except the unending openness, a void beyond dimensions.
Horatia looked down but no impression of vertigo became real. Although it was like floating over an abyss, she could still imagine something solid beneath her feet, a narrow path tethering her to the life she knew. She inched forward, one step at a time, looking for anything that stood out against the indistinct dreamscape. There was nothing, no points of reference, not a single droplet of another color in sight.
"Okay, what is going on? I touched that thing and ended up here, whatever 'here' is."
Though she only thought this, the words whirled right out of her mouth, stopping in front of her confounded face. The hazy letters flashed, rearranged themselves like the runes she had come across in the lab, except on a much larger scale. If they had eyes, they would stare at her like a ravenous predator.
"Am I inside the artifact? No, that's impossible, right?"
The words offered no response, just a fleeting repetition of her distraught emotions. She reached for one, recognized the sequence of symbols it transformed into. She had seen it right before reality shifted, almost like a password into the unknown.
"This is pretty and all but I want out," she said. "Where's the exit?"
Silence. Total and unbroken. No new sequence dared to shine, nothing else came into existence. She swiped the imaginary words with a raging hand. They vanished like an illusion of smoke.
"Shit!"
If there was anything good about it at least, is that it was quiet. No Super Patriarchy, no imminent doom. Nothing but calmness, almost like a slow and deliberate induction before the soft descent into the pleasures of trance. Still, too much silence was also an invitation to laziness, and she had a job to do. Her mission to tear down the structure of the dying regime from inside out was far from over.
"That's true," an echo stirred from parts unknown. The constancy of the environment made it impossible to determine where those words had sprung from, yet they carried within them an all too familiar resolve. Horatia tried to hold on to them, intrigued and afraid.
"Now it's not the time to talk to yourself, R," she trembled. "You've done that too much already, don't you think?"
The new sentence flew past her lips, exploded into another projection of symbols. This time, the order in which they presented themselves was brand new despite some familiar trappings. As long as she remained stationary so did they, a stand-off of impossible odds where the rules made no sense.
"Seriously, what does this mean?"
Horatia perked her ears waiting for some kind of response, perhaps a cheap Zen adagio about finding meaning within her, the key to inner strength and other nonsense. Okay, not entirely nonsense but fortune cookie philosophy was the last thing she needed to solve her new conundrum.
"It's not a conundrum. You're the conundrum."
The voice again, now closer this time. So close that if it were tangible, she could hold it in her hand and caress it.
"I don't have time for riddles."
"At the moment, you have all the time you need. For once, Time is on your side."
"Who are you?"
"Another conundrum."
"Where are you?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
"No, nothing is."
"You're not paying enough attention then."
"Attention to what?"
"Take a closer look."
The voice receded into the spiraling maze of words that had appeared all around her; letters fading in and out; symbols fading out and in. Within the intersection of the two, alternating between truth and falsehood, reality was clear as day.
"It's a code," Horatia muttered as she followed the patterns with her right index finger. "That's an A, and that's an S... a message?"
"We both are."
"I don't understand what that means."
"Neither did I the first time. It gets easier, Horatia. Trust me."
"I will need more than that to go on," the young hypnotist replied.
"How about this then?"
A single black dot blinked to her left, followed by another one on the opposite side. A gentle hum reverberated in the negative distance between the two. She blinked too, and the dots grew, first to the size of glass marbles and then old tennis balls.
The hum became a buzz, three dissonant notes stuck in a loop, the black expanding to contain a cluster of dust, stars, and galaxies. The invisible floor deliquesced under Horatia's feet.
"One day, all of this will vanish but Space has never been the final frontier," the disembodied echo continued. "That thing you've been missing all your life, that thing you want more than anything else... that thing has found you again."
"Again?"
"It's all a circle, it's all a spiral. Time isn't a mystery, it never was. Seeing through it though, navigating its corridors, knowing which road leads where and how... now that's the greatest aspiration of them all, isn't it?"
As if acknowledging the words and bowing before them, the holographic stars exploded in a cornucopia of images of bygone days, realities she had only dared to imagine when no one inside the Campus Library was watching. She saw...
... the majestic outlines of the Great Pyramids and their overarching shadows stretching across the desert...
... Julius Caesar laying in a pool of his own blood, his famous last words muzzled by the roaring sounds of the surrounding crowd...
... a tea party gone wrong in what was once known as Boston Harbor...
... the maiden voyage of a ship that would sink faster than a rock...
... mushroom clouds lighting up the night sky as thousands of men and women at ground level wept their life away...
... and more, so many more... parallel ramblings, impossible juxtapositions, deviations from the standard begging for another chance. Literature was wrong, dejected, sanitized. What had been was still in the process of being, millions of years of evolution falling like rain.
"There's no way! Are you saying that...?"
"I'm not saying anything. You do it."
"... the artifact isn't a weird explosive device but a fucking time machine?!!"
"How else would Time be on your side? Knowing the code is the first step to changing the code. You've always wanted a tool to do that. I hope you still do otherwise all of this will have been for nothing."
"I... you still haven't told me who you are. And don't say 'another conundrum.' again because that doesn't say shit!"
"I think you already know the answer but I'll tell you, anyway. I am... a ghost, a phantom, a remnant of the code rewritten many times in the past. You've always suspected this but History was fractured, exposed, the gaps between eras filled with seeds of riveting lies. As generations passed, those seeds have grown, branched out, twisted the natural flow of events. You of all people know brainwashing is a slow burn but if you brainwash Time itself from the start then..."
Horatia bit her lower lip as the truth made itself known. "That means that The Super Patriarchy..."
"... I think you mean The Super Sham, the mega-hoax. The collective dreams of madmen who first accessed the code and tampered with it. God knows how many times I've tried to stop it. The more I tried, the less of me remained for Time has a way to punish those that dwell inside its core for too long so here I am. I linger in-between the holes created by my failures, a conundrum that will not clear unless the cycle begins anew. I used what little power I had left to bring you this gift. This is your chance to do what I couldn't. Do you want to change the status quo, Horatia? Do you want to be the message instead of just a herald?"
"I want them all to burn and rot in Hell, starting with that son of a bitch D for killing Lana and trying to do the same thing to my mother and Alex!" Horatia declared, and there's no greater strength than that of a determined woman. "You said you brought me this gift but how did you kno... oh, of course!"
"You're finally getting it, good. Yes, I peered into the fabric of Time, examined as many variations as I could. In most, your resolve and your naivete would bring you here. I didn't know when but I had an estimate to work with so I took a chance. I've been trying to get your attention ever since you entered the Center."
"The pulse?"
"Dramatic, I know, but it served its purpose. This sequence of events could have gone wrong in so many different ways and yet here we are and they do not understand what they've just unleashed."
"So what do you want me to do then?"
"Accept the code, crack it, and you can make sure D is never born to commit the atrocity he did. Hell, you can make all of this go away for good. There's no greater punishment than oblivion. The world must forget them, Horatia, otherwise it will never be cleansed. Are you willing to do whatever it takes?"
"When have I not?"
"Then it's time. It's time to reclaim the natural flow of Time. It's time for me to die so you can live. The bracelet will be your guide once you unlock it. Don't let them harness its power again for there are far worse futures where they exist and none of them must happen. You must leave the Center with it, do you understand? You must and I will help you do that."
"Help me how?"
"I have a plan, one last hurrah. It will be risky but it's all we've got. Forgive me, my dear, but this will hurt..."
A storm of runes erupted from what was left of the fantastical landscape, its open cracks pouring like molten lava. One by one, they were shot against Horatia's left wrist, symbolic missiles containing myriads of possibilities and paradoxes waiting to be broken. The young hypnotist writhed for even though the images were metaphorical, the pain of the forced branding was very much real. The dream collapsed into nothingness and she fell with it.
* * *
"Horatia?" Lazendorf shook her rigid body, a hint of concern in his sunken eyes that felt genuine for the first time in many years. "Horatia! Wake up!"
"Huh?" she blurted, her tongue caught in a knot, every muscle numb as if she had been at the far end of an electrical explosion.
"What happened? The moment you touched that thing, you went blank. You're looking rather pale, too."
