Frightened Boy by Scott Kelly (top e book reader .txt) đ
- Author: Scott Kelly
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My last sight before we peeled out of sight was Whisper facing the Mal with a gun in her hand, the two of them the last alive.
21. Sun and Moon
Escher rode hard out of Kingwood Forest and into the surrounding brush lands. He took Lux and I out and away from the train tracks and onto a faded trail thatâd once been a busy street. It was so worn and cracked at this point that entire sections were impassible and had to be driven around with care.
Now that we were out of Banlo Bay, Escher seemed to relax a bit. He bit into a cigar heâd pulled from the truck and commandeered the jeep with a smile. Lux sat quietly, his headphones pulled over his ears, and simply watched, expressionless, as what used to be Texas passed around him.
So, weâd lost another one. Guts, Grundel, Sam, Malâmaybe Whisper, and of course Erika. I didnât like my chances for survival very much. I supposed it didnât matter; I had been dead from the minute I saw the big red spot of blood on Erikaâs blouse.
The plains surrounding Banlo Bay were flat and dry, an endless expanse. I thought about my two companions. They had history here. Theyâd explored, seen the world, and fought in wars.
Well, I had history too. How many rotted logs had I slept in during the Collapse? How many ditches had I hidden in?
Hoped Iâd never be back here. Now, everything else I had was gone. If there was any future at all for me, this would be it.
Good riddance, future.
I looked at the back of Escherâs head. This man wanted to destroy Banlo Bay, though I wasnât sure how. But he was wrong, wasnât he? There were innocent people in that city. People like I was, weeks ago. Did I want Escher to succeed? If he did have a way to destroy the city, would I try to stop him? Little Brother was there. Little Brother deserved to die, after all. But surely not along with millions more.
Erika, what should I do?
I decided to settle for the second most random decision-maker I could think of. I pulled a coin out of my pocket, a meaningless relic from my old life. Heads, and I would try to save Banlo Bay. Tails, and I'd run the first chance I got.
I flipped it low: heads.
I flipped it again: heads.
Fucking Christ. Give me a break here, Erika.
I flipped it again: heads.
Fuck
*
Escher slowed the jeep to a halt as the sun began to fall on the grassy plains of the Red Zone. Traveling over the dangerous, uneven terrain was uncomfortable, tiring work. We bounced constantly about in the vehicle, each bump taking Escherâs foot off the pedal and crashing it back down. We had been following traces of a highway, but dust and cracks had obscured it for some miles, and we werenât sure if we had driven off of it or not.
âDo you even remember where it was?â Lux asked Escher.
âOf course,â Escher said. âIt will make itself known to me when the time comes.â
âYou were delirious when you saw it first,â Lux said. âMaybe you imaginedââ he stopped himself, realizing the futility of the argument.
Escher grinned.
âYou should give this up,â Lux said. âIt isnât worth it. Besides, I donât know if I can live with it.â
âYou donât have to live with it,â Escher said. âOnly I do, and I think Iâm going to enjoy it.â
âWhat if I try to stop you?â Lux asked.
âThen youâll get stopped.â
My ears burned with nervousness at the conversation. Was this Project Epoch? I had to know. âSo whatâs Project Epoch? What are you two talking about?â
Escher turned to me and then looked at Lux. He grinned smugly around the fat cigar in his mouth. âWhy donât we stop here?â Escher said. âItâs been a long day, and I donât think trying to navigate the jeep over these roads in the dark is going to get us very far.â
Escher pulled the jeep to a stop alongside a tall rocky crag, outside of viewânot that it mattered. We hadnât seen another person since weâd left Kingwood Forest.
An hour later, we found ourselves behind the shelter of the cliff, sitting around a small campfire on a warm night. Lux was cooking cans of dried foods that weâd manage to salvage from a ration pack in the jeep. I didnât want to think about how ancient the food must be, and my hunger overtook my disgust.
âWe might as well kick back and relax.â Escher said. âFrightened Boy, come tomorrow, you and Lux and I will likely be the only human beings alive in a 1,000-mile radius.â
âWhy?â I asked instead.
âWhat do you mean, why? I think the idea is pretty clear at this point.â Escher grinned.
âI get itâreuniting a fractured mind, eliminating the cancer that is Little Brother, but how do you plan on killing everyone?â
âI really canât tell you that, without telling you how I got here in the first place. Do you want to hear?â
âYes, very much so,â I answered.
Escher leaned back and looked up at the waning sun and rising moon.
22. Magic Mirror
âThe best way I can describe it to you is as a dream. I had a long, long dream that I lived a life in another time. I dreamed about mountains of Italy. I remember learning the seventeen sacred patterns of translational symmetry. I dreamed about the smell of sticky bread and freshly cut wood. I remember coming to America. The last thing I remember is trying to draw Gödelâs Incompleteness Theorem. I think that may have set this into motion,â the Red King announced.
âWhat is that?â I asked him.
Escher stared up at the night sky as he spoke, his voice strangely detached. âItâs something a mathematician was working on in my time. Itâs mathematical proof that more things will always be true than can be provenâproof that we canât understand the world around us. Sometimes I can still see the work I used to do. It just appears to me. Like when I saw Whisper, I knew Iâd seen her somewhere before. She was from this past dream. So are you, Clark, and you, Lux. Youâre all people I once knew, all part of my old life somehow.
âIt all used to be so clear to me. As time passes, everything becomes less certain, and it starts to make too much sense. Thatâs why I take my own bloodâitâs recursion. Recursion reminds me of what brought me here. Itâs more of the math that made me.
âI woke up in a plain white room. No one was around, and I thought I must be in Heaven. I had no body. I just simply was. I thought I must be going crazy. Iâm certain I still am.
âIt seemed like weeks. Iâd see patterns everywhere I looked, infinite loops climbing up into themselves. First it was my hands, then my body, and soon I was recreated in my entirety. Eventually moebius strips built themselves into lamps, into a bedâŠ
âReality was like soft clay. I could bend it however I wanted. It became clear to me that I was trapped in my own head. And I wasnât simply moving things with my mind. I just worked really hard to believe they were a different way, and they would beâat least for a while. The patterns thatâd turned themselves into a bed and a lamp continued to develop into carpet, windows, a doorway. I was building the world around me.
âI was here. This reality had begun to construct itself in my mind. The world was taking shape, but almost immediately, things started to go wrong,â Escher said. His speech had picked up speed as events became clearer to him, and now he spoke in hushed, excited tones. " The area around me turned into a military base. I was terrified by what I saw, and that influenced everything around me. I could still see the pattern that bound it all together, but the figures it was making were all sharp, dangerous angles and polygonal pandemonium.
âAnd then, the first doctor came. He looked so real. I marveled at his skin, still with a few rough parallelograms visible below the surface but mostly looking like the real thing.
âThey made me watch television. It was a window into the darkest part of my mind. It said to never trust anyone. Never trust a Stranger. Never help someone in need. Mind your own business. In all that, my own paranoia was made tangible. This is what the television was telling me, but why was it letting me know these things? Why would my own mind want to show them to me? How sick with paranoia was I?
âAfter a while, a doctor started interviewing me every day for a week, trying to see if I was fully functioning I guess. I didnât ask. I could see right through him. He was so basic, such a bad facsimile of a living person.
ââWho are you?â heâd ask. We sat on either sides of a giant metal table with heavy metal chairs bolted to the floor.
ââIâm Escher.â I knew that much. And when I looked at something, I knew how to use it. The television remote, doors, cars, and whatever else I saw was like Iâd already known how it worked before. Or, more accurately, Iâd just made the entire thing up in my head.
âAt the time, I thought asking questions of the doctors would be a waste. I didnât understand yet that I could unlock information about myself through the world Iâd created. I thought it was a stupid, crazy thing to talk to a figment of my own imagination. He wasnât even fully formed. He had triangles for irises.
âYou have to understand, Frightened Boy. All Iâve ever done is make order out of chaos, and now it wasnât working. My mind was full of chaos, and I had no idea how to make order of it.
âIf you can understand what a dream isâI donât know thatâthen what would you do? If you knew it wasnât real. So I picked up the table and bashed his skull in, just to make his image go away,â he said, sighing.
âSo your first instinct was to be violent?â I asked.
âI couldnâtâŠreason with them. I regret it too. I never lifted a finger against a man in my last life, but you have to understand my frustration. But yes, itâs possible that this initial violence set the tone for all of my later encounters.
âIâd built myself into a military base, and everything was locked down. I didnât careâIâm God. They couldnât possibly hurt me.
âI walked out into a hallway. Two soldiers had been watching from the glass, and they had seen me kill the doctor. Of course, he was just a part of my imagination, so I wasn't really killing anyoneâjust erasing an illusion. Winning an argument with myself.
âThey met me at the door with rifles raised, ready to kill me. I put a hand on the barrel of
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