-something that was difficult for him to comprehend. Max lowered his eye from the digital sight balking as his jaw slacked. What laid before him through the open doorway was not the crew’s quarters at all, but instead a fecal-brown esophageal gullet slowly undulating, contracting, and finally expanding. Silver phlegm drooled from its musculature, puddling at the doorway. The smell was rancid, like a two month rotted corpse that subsisted on a diet of rotten eggs. The stench stung tears to the corner of Mobius’s eyes, but did not break his trance-like stare. With the raw odor brought a tinge of iron taste to the air, like the operative had bitten his lip. The rush of sickening humidity was reminiscent of a living organism respiring.
Max’s eyes saccade as he took in details of the organ. Did he really enter? Or had he always been here. Max didn’t move, but the hallway’s pulsating muscle shoved him into its depths at a slow, rhythmic beckon. He could hear the cycle of the domain aspirating, death rattling, and then rejuvenating to breathing in a revolving door of suffering, death, and life. But this wasn’t life that was worth living, instead this was life with the sole purpose of suffering. Tortured life support. A glob of quicksilver mucus drizzled down Max’s shoulder and pooled at his feet like saliva from a hungry beast. A beast which had already swallowed the operative whole.
“What--” Max breathlessly whispered, and was instantly met with taste of iron that left him cottonmouth.
Mobius didn’t even realize that he dropped his carbine in his stupor. The only thing that now caught his attention were his hands. His palms were desiccated, lined with deep purple veins, and punctuated by the thinness of his fingers that could trace all the way to his very visible metacarpal bones.
“Oh..” was all he could manage in his astonishment, as he perceived himself almost with an out-of-body experience. “I…”
The ex-soldier’s body was withered to almost fetal atrophy. The fact that he was standing was a miracle, because his feet and legs fractured with every gentle nudge turned violent shove the floor goaded him with. Like a standing skeleton made of solidified dust, Mobius could count every rib, and even saw the feeble tapping of his own heart under his chest. His elbows, shoulders, knees and hips were like nodes on an emaciated weed. He was a weed. No. A corpse. He attempted to scream, but all his decrepit lungs could manage was a wheezing moan as they collapsed upon themselves, and the accent of his suffering was him suffocating on his own saliva in a death rattle.
That wasn’t the room’s death rattle… it was his.
Within that moment the most powerful urge welled inside Mobius. The urge to live. That desire was strong enough to pull him from his mummified corpse.
He gasped as he looked back over his shoulder, a cold sweat dampening his brow, and his twisted, white knuckles gripping tightly over Logic. The corpse was behind him, laid to rest as the esophageal wall swallowed it with the quiescent inevitability of a corpse in a cremation furnace.
The operative composed himself, noticing that the pauldrons of his body armor were missing. The kevlar shoulder pieces had completely dissolved.
As he continued down the throat, a new feeling surged within him: the opposite of what he felt before. Power. His muscles swelled, and heat expanded within his chest. An adrenal kick to the gonads filled his body with pure energy. He gritted his teeth as he felt a lighting storm surging through his nervous system. Saliva trailed from the corners of his mouth, as he began to froth with rabid fury. His heart slammed in his chest like a boxer flurrying a speed bag.
Max closed his eyes and his hands viced around the handle of the carbine. Surprisingly, the metal of the gun’s handle crumbled like a tin can in his unmodified grip. His body shook and buzzed as a paroxysm wracked his essence and, finally, he capitulated to the rush. The operative’s eyes sprang open, mouth gaped, and he screamed sound out of existence.
The desperate gaze of the operative met a beautiful patterned blue/green orb, whorled with strands of white. He recognized it; a child would. Earth. A marble in an ocean of black. He reached out and cupped the world in his palms. It was his marble, and he would protect it. The emotional scales that was weighed down with power was balanced with something else, now.
Love.
This was not lust or appreciation, but a paternal affection for something that he cradled. This planet was fragile. It needed him, and he would give anything to protect it. A new emotion welled inside him, as if it were injected in his body by some celestial scientist who experimented with his emotions. A guarded desire to defend this planet from something distant. He took that power, channeling it within himself, and departed.
Distance, time, speed, with his new power Max was unfettered by these concepts. When he willed himself to be there, he was, had always been, and always would be there. Existing there, not there, and everywhere, and nowhere. Before him in the vastness of space he stared down the End of all Things. The abstract darkness that existed within him, and permeated all things. The culmination of all things was its expiration.
This was not the freeze death, the great expansion, or the strange apocalyptic theories of the destruction of the universe. Instead, this was the destruction of all universes, of all recognition, of all time, of all space, of all concepts, of all emptiness, of all things. There was no after, only before. It was not an enemy to be faced, nor was it an obstacle to be overcome. Eternity ended past its event horizon. Beyond its event horizon was beyond indescribability, a space, a time, a place and none of these, a paradigm existence that was a swan song for the nihilist--not even nothingness, itself.
Max flew into this darkness. And he, too, ended.
A combination of sweat and tears streamed down Max’s cheeks as he watched the noble sacrifice. This death was the ultimate death, the most final of all.
“I don’t understand,” he whispered, “what is all this?”
The shinguards of his armor were gone.
Mobius closed his eyes, settling his nerves as best as he could, he wasn’t sure if he could put what he saw behind him, but knew he had to. His boots slapped against the wet silver saliva of the throat, even as he continued into the belly of the beast. His resolve carried his weighted feet, even as the gullet attempted, to bog him down.
Cringing, the first sensation of change Max felt was a drop in humidity that left him in a cold sweat. His feet petered to a stop as he felt the sloshing slog wane. The pounding war drums that represented his heart rate slowed, diminuendo. His breathing steadied, and he blinked his eyes open through beads of sweat. Max found himself in a room not unlike the interrogation rooms he imagined Thomas had probably interrogated many-a-prisoner in. He wasn’t cuffed in, though. And he wasn’t starting down some gruff Dick Tracy on the other side. It was just him, a table, and a strange sword laid presentation style before him.
The operative had spent enough time around Gennosuke to figure out that this was a katana. Against his better judgment he approached it, cautiously, and his fingers curled around the hilt. A voice within him screamed against his folly, and begged him not to do it, but it was almost as if he were in a dream, and was incapable of deviating from its dark script.
As soon as he took the weapon in hand Mobius was assailed with a psychic force he could not grasp. The pressure that mounted inside of his skull was immediate--like an F53 taking off from ground to breaking the sound barrier. His teeth gnashed together so tightly he could feel a molar crack in the back of his jaw. He would have screamed but his trachea seized in rigor-like pain. His muscles tensed, flexing, and his appendages closed as if he were being electrocuted. Blood leaked from his ears, lacrimated from his eyes, dripped from his nose, and painted his clenched teeth in a crimson grin.
Max’s mind was conscious of the failings of his body, and he felt every wave of convulsion and every seizure that wracked him so. He was able to sense his organs shutting down like they were buildings in a great power outage. None of it compared to what he saw, though. What he touched minds with. It entered and flowed into him. His body could not possibly contain what was within that blade. A mental manifestation of himself screamed in hysterical agony, but even that was drowned out in the roaring bedlam that was housed within his mindscape.
Veins surfaced on his temples, and his teeth shattered as he began to tap into his superhuman strength that was amplified infinitely by whatever this thing was. His eyes exploded as an ocean’s worth of pressure popped them like Dionysus eating a grape. His bowels evacuated and soon the blood and drool that leaked from the corners of his mouth graduated into a bloody foam.
And then, and only then, when the agony transcended the capability that his physical form could withstand:
His head exploded.
Like a pulpy watermelon hit with a sledgehammer, Mobius’s head became an organic grenade. Shards of skull fragments shredded the wooden table in front of him and gray matter, covered in viscera-slicked gore painted the interrogation room in red. The skull bomb left behind a ragged, split stump that was once the mobius operative’s neck, and as his body fell to its knees, then prostrated, his muscle quivered with final convulsions that signified the end of Maxwell Lionheart’s life.
And he saw it all.
This vision had stopped Max dead in his tracks, and by the time it’s seizure-inducing mindscape subsided, he found himself swallowed in the hallway nearly up to his knees. The fatigue was beginning to settle in, transferring from his mind to his body, and it required some effort for him to pull himself out of the organic quicksand and force himself to trudge forward. He looked down, expecting to see sweat staining the front of his body armor, but instead his gaze was only met with bare chest.
Max continued with what little strength he had, pushing on into madness. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing, and his hands shook as he trained his weapon in front of him, defending himself against nothing. He knew he shouldn’t have come in here. He regretted every second of it.
Behind him, Max’s keen eyes heard the pattering of feet splashing around in the silvery liquid, and instinctively he wheeled around, but saw nothing. This half-second of automatic reaction was enough for them to catch him. Two sets of hands gripped his shoulders and arms, and a blast of daylight temporarily blinded him as he could feel heavy bodies tackling him to the ground, and shouting that he couldn’t make sense of over the ringing in his ears.
Before he even knew what happened he was on his stomach, and the arms were cuffing his hands behind his back. On the back of his skull he could feel a sensation he knew all too well--the cold muzzle of a gun.
“Target secure.” One of the heavily-distorted voices above him droned. “Moving delta code: 2237 to extraction point. ETA five minutes.”
The two sets of arms hoisted him to his feet, and with weary eyes Max regarded the destruction of the Argentinian city around him. He was back to the present. The cyclone leveled the block, and from the appearances of things a building had fallen on him. He half-walked and half-fell to a small, squat building that stood on the outskirts of the ground-zero block. His mouth felt like it had been on the business end of a dremel saw, and the only sound he could make was raspy gasps that existed straight from his labored lungs. The three figures he recognized--Mobius operatives. They were dressed in all the standard gear, with masks obfuscating their faces. One of them turned to him, pulling out a small flashlight and clicked it on in his eyes.
“He’s with us. Bag him.”
One of the operatives behind him pulled a sack over his head, but even in Max’s broken-down state he could still put together where he was and where he was going. They moved him forward three paces, clicked something plastic that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand up. A beacon--they activated a beacon. His hypothesis was ratified when a sensation churned his stomach and he felt as if he had just attempted to step on a stair that was not there. It coupled with a sharp pain to the back of the skull.
Time was difficult to discern as Mobius faded in and out of consciousness for what he guessed to be a few hours. When he woke, he woke to the raucousness of voices. Thousands of voices that murmured together in aggregate polyglot. His senses returned to him with dawdling lethargy. His vision faded once or twice, and Max simply felt as if he could not will himself to immediate consciousness.
“Before us,” a charismatic voice spoke, measured pauses and all, “lies a traitor responsible for the deaths of thousands.”
“But this is one, broken man, was not the mastermind, only the muscle.”
Max’s vision flickered in enough to catch the image of Apollo, dressed in his violet and black pinstripe slacks, deep vest accompanied with golden buttons, and his white dress shirt perfectly pressed underneath. What caught Mobius the most was Apollo’s eyes, filled with disdain and predatory nature. His vision drowsily drifted upwards to take in the orange sky and the skyscrapers that towered like solemn judges. One in particular, he recognized to be Discorporate Productions, it was the preeminent arbitrator of his fate, and its peak scowled at him from infinite heights.
He exhaled, unable to make out any of Apollo’s speech, and the breath burned his throat as if he were breathing fire. The ex-operative willed himself to move, and got far less return for his effort. Slumping over, he could see the throngs of people who had come to watch their glorious overlord speak. Apollo always did have a way with the people.
“...we shall not stand idly by while this corruption devours our homes, our families, our lives. We call for war! And know that I do not sit behind my desk, as leaders past, did. I strike the first blow! I fight with you on the front lines…”
In the din of a revelrous crowd Max’s superhuman sense picked up an almost imperceptible chk-click. Suddenly the threat that it implied squeezed what little adrenaline his body had left. Though his fight against Forge had spent him, his mind took stranglehold of his body, and he was able to shift himself onto his knees. As his senses swirled to full consciousness, Max found himself upon a dais, like an executioner’s platform, and a sea of people extended through the streets of Capital City in every direction. His heart pole vaulted in his chest against his sternum as he realized the gravity of the situation. But it was too late.
“...Our marvels reach the heavens! There is no greater feat than to be human! There is no enemy that we cannot defeat!”
Apollo whirled around, his eyes burning with fervor as he pressed the barrel of a gun to the front of Mobius’s head. For a moment, Max’s out-of-body experience showed him a look on his face that he would never forget. Naked, and beaten, Max resembled a prisoner of war. His hair was tousled about, and his lips were busted, his face bruised. He could see his nose twisted, crooked and broken. Two streams of long-dried blood decorated him with a crimson moustache. Though there was heavy swelling around his brow, both his eyes were shot wide open, pupils dilated. These gateways showed Max’s emotions most clearly, and all of Capital City could and would see it.
Unabated terror.
“THIS IS THE SOVEREIGN MANIFESTO!”
Darkness.
Max blinked back the throbbing in his eyes as he watched himself collapse onto the ground in a lifeless heap. This vision, too, subsided, and a corrosive touch ebbed away at his sanity. He could feel his flesh crawl with a shudder as he passed by, leaving behind his clumped corpse and the roaring of angry Capital City rioters. He was back in the throat of the beast, and his body began to reflect the fatigue his mind felt. But he pushed on, as he always did, and as he always would. One foot in front of another, he told himself.
And, suddenly, he felt his legs give out. No, the floor gave out under him, it dropped into a swift decline that sent him skidding down its silvery mucus-lined muscle. His velocity picked up and the muscles shifted as the living being shuddered off the unwanted pressure on its throat, which spiraled Max out of control. He tumbled violently down the shaft, head over heels, shoulder over shoulder, twisting his limbs as contractions pummeled and crushed him, and before long the abuse ended by expelling him through an esophageal sphincter into a vast void.
For Mobius, it was continuous falling. An endless descent into a hazy void that expanded in every direction without escape and without distraction. Max was trapped here, and soon eternity would rear its ugly head at him, and his mind, too, would be wiped to a bloody, angry pulp, like Forge. He felt he was close to his limit.. The void was warped from something it used to be, its emptiness was filled with malice perceived by the mind that was lost within. The heart of the beast.
He wasn’t sure what happened, but his body armor was ruined, and he could not find the carbine anywhere--in the chaos he must have lost it. He was right where he started: naked, defenseless, with nothing but his willpower to subsist upon. He centered himself as he tumbled through endless emptiness head over heels, and straightened his body into a pencil dive.
“I told you not to come here,” a familiar voice barbed, “but you didn’t listen. You’re stupider than you look.”
Max ignored Forge’s jeering and continued to rekindle his calm. “You thought the journey was bad? We are only getting started. I have the rest of your life to fuck with you, and I’m gunna show you exactly what waits for you with that silver cumstain.”
The operative couldn’t be prepared for the mental onslaught Forge oppressed him with. The previous graphic visions continued ceaselessly, each one a new tool unveiled from the repository of pain. He lived through all the visions, existing different times and places simultaneously as others and himself. Max saw Gennosuke withered and wretched, and it was him. He saw Forge, mutilated and disfigured, and it was him. He saw Thomas, skewered by his own skeleton, forced to watch a woman he cared very much for die, and it was him. He saw Apollo, crucified outside his office, and it was him. He saw Pawn, drawn and quartered by legions of dead, and it was him. He saw Tristan, who lived the scientific dharma wheel’s constant state of life and death, and life and death, and it was him. Max lived vicariously through every fatality.
Max suffered, forever, in the timeless rift that ruined Forge, but this didn’t sate the phantasm’s indignation. What afflicted Mobius was no longer human nor petitioner, but was a spirit of animus. Anger and pain reigned as the gods of this rift, and every moment of physical, psychological, and spiritual torture expanded their clergy. The Spirit of Animus’s gospel was to break him. To mold the man with its proverbs of pain into a protoplasm of sensations. A bundle of twitching spasmodic nerve clusters formed from the clay of quintessence. A thing whose only method of living was to feel unending anguish. The beast.
The Spirit of Animus was opposed with issues twofold. Firstly, the vicissitudes of the maladies inflicted upon Max wrought new and interesting ways of suffering. The idiosyncratic responses of Max’s pain would be prescribed to physical reaction. It would lose the sui generis that made Mobius... Mobius. Secondly, and more frustratingly so, was that the operative was still actively resisting it. Even though the Animus had broken his cerebral Resolve and disarmed the phrenic armaments that was his capability of Logic, he persisted through Will. No amount of violation, despoliation, or desecration changed that. Max did persevere.
In the absence of self, something else composited within Maxwell’s spirit. Untapped strength flowed through him, renewing his resolve, restoring his sense of logic, and steeling his will. It came in a phrase linguistically unfamiliar to him, but through some miracle transcribed itself in the grey matter of his brain. It settled in his ventricles, and pumped through his veins, traveling through his arteries. It filled his lungs, and settled his stomach. It reverberated through his psyche, and filled his tumultuous mind with a meadow of calm.
“Gam zeh ya’avor.”
A mantra that annealed Max into stone. He wasn’t sure where it came from, but it rooted deeply into his chest. He couldn’t even think of its origin, because any fraction of cerebration dedicated to anything other than his mantra resulted in agony beyond apperception.
“Gam zeh ya’avor.”
Over a course of what seemed like years Max had transcended the Spirit of Animus’s menagerie of misery, and its oceanic influence thus did wane like low tide. A metaphysical battle waged, and the inch that was given to Mobius was taken by the mile. He bulwarked himself against its malign influence and pushed the line. The counterbalance shifted, and though little physical ramifications manifested, the war of immaterialism raged. A skirmish that stretched into a battle that stretched into a war that stretched into a lifetime of strife that stretched into an eternity raged and rebounded within the rift until its infinitesimal gulf could not encompass the ferocity.
When the eons built to aeons Max soon found himself the hands that molded, but never did he lose sight of his purpose. He did not become the hands that would crush, but instead he would become the virtuous conqueror. And finally when his thoughts of ‘gam zeh ya’avor’ subsided an anamnesis returned to him, starting with a name.
Forge.
He dispelled the Spirit of Animus, and with it the pervasive darkness that Forged its malice. A cloud that clung to the silver creature like a haze of fat maggot-bearing flies. But the presence did not vacate, it merely moved. This would be his burden to bear now. The cancer slinked back into remission, waiting for its day. This was the true enemy. When the haze of enmity dispersed, Max could see distant nebulae, spiral galaxies, and somewhere within that abstract picture of light and darkness was his marble.
Gradually, his freefall slowed to a hover, and the operative’s insides settled. Max looked about the void, and knew that he had conquered Forge as he did Gennosuke. Closing his eyes, he focused his mind, willing the milieu to return to its natural state. Soundlessly, the void changes to the mausoleum that was the crew’s quarters. It resembled a morgue more than it did a barracks. Beds sat parallel to one another, spacing with uniform distance. Upon each of these beds there was a body with a cloth sheet draped over it. He didn’t focus too much on the cadavers, but he judged there to maybe be thirty within the cabin. The main sounds within the room was the metronome of respirators that pumped into these flesh bags. Instruments connected them and the ship, and pumped their vitae to somewhere Max could only guess. It was all metaphorical and metaphysical, but somewhere in here Forge and Gennosuke laid with the rest of those who contacted Xelas.
He pitied these bodies who were farmed for this creature’s livelihood, and resolved to never end up as they did.
With that, Max turned, opened the door, and left.
