The world was all there was and never more. Gray arch of the sky, scantily strewn with slowly pulsing lights above the Megapolis of hard edged towering blocks, laboriously flying upward like a fist to the face of MOG. And it was beautiful. The deep canyons between the buildings were alive with dancing, crackling, lights afloat in the amber air, more light spilling from the windows and walls of the comfortably looming buildings. Far below the blinking sky they kept the streets alive with the ever potential glow of a dawn, one that continued on forever like the city and the sky and the world. Never going out, a consolation to all who walked this labyrinth for though none of them ever spoke it they all had one fear coiled in the pit of their soul like a serpent. The Dark.

Dan knew. Here in the churning crowd in the street and sounds of a city defiantly alive he could smell it. It was in the wrinkles at the corner of a woman’s eye as she looked at the jade, glowing holo-tat on her forearm. In the smile, worn like a mask, on the face of a man across the street as he searched the crowds and cars and boards and bikes. Lurking behind the laugh of the woman to Dan’s right, she was laughing at something he’d said but he couldn’t remember what it was. The lights flooded his eyes, noise filled his ears, the blank faces of the buildings around him so comforting before in their steadfastness weighed down on his head and back, crushing, bursting with suffocation. The Dark. He could imagine it like a living thing, a hidden force shoving all around, pressing, filling the light and the sound it…

“DAN!”

Her voice shattered the world. He looked at her, Mattie, her hair was dyed pink tonight and tossed over a pale shoulder and down the open back of a red flowing dress that swirled with shimmering colors and glowing red sparks that sizzled in the evening air when she moved. By MOG she was beautiful.

“You had that look again,” She giggled and clutched his arm, the holo-tats on his skin swirled and danced at her touch as she looked up at him, worry haunting the skin behind her makeup.

“What look?” He drew her closer and breathed in the scent of her, sticky sweetness and chemicals and the faint sting of vodk on her breath.

“Like you saw a hole open in the sky,” She looked up at him, the vodk was stronger, but she always smelled of it since he’d met her. “You worry me sometimes Dan, I’ve seen you look that way more and more often.” She giggled again and leaned against him, the worry seeming to melt out of her. More. She smelled more of the vodk, more than before, when they’d first met, when she had seemed to glow with young light and so had he. Before they’d dulled, before he’d heard the ticking, the heartbeat snaking its way through everything around them and seen the shadows move.

“I just need another drink,” he said and could tell she didn’t believe him. He didn’t either. He took her hand, the glowing designs on both their skin mirroring and swirling together mimicking each other, a continuous never ending blossoming of design always the same in its never repeating. “And I need to dance.”

She smiled up at him and squeezed his hand, all worry gone from her along with most her thoughts. Had she wanted to forget? Or did she simply ignore? He didn’t care, he wished he couldn’t think.

“Come on Shimmer.”

“Mattie!” She protested as they wove their way down the sidewalk.

The crowds thickened, trudging toward the center of the city and they flowed with the people. No one actually knew if it was the center of the city but they all thought it was. More colors greeted the eye here, the walls of the buildings around them leaked color that pooled and ran across the sidewalk and into the street where it mixed under foot before oozing down into the pavement. The amber light too began to warp and split, mixing with blue and scarlet, aquamarine and winking white. Shop windows broke the curtain of color in the Megapolis walls, their displays and music and vice and holographs beckoning from within.

Dan could see the people relaxing here, the crowds softening and melting into the miasmatic comfort of the place. Here and there some would peel off into one house of solace or another which stretched for floors and floors overhead, a labyrinth to lose oneself in and abandon for a time that nagging fear chewing away at them all. He knew this. And he despised them from his knowledge. The crowds thinned, succumbing to the beckoning of old mistresses and new imagined loves.

Here the streets were wider than in the surrounding amber and gray sprawl, the colors and light shifted as well. Everything was a shimmering white suffused with veins of gold and emerald sparkling beneath a well balanced dispersion of tastefully warm, yellow, light. Here shadows were nearly allowed to materialize and the brutal, flat buildings took on a texture other than shouting absence. Shop windows were empty here, simple signs of harsh letters on a smooth background announced their contents, vices of the mind, gifts of MOG; books, paintings, sculpture, symphonic, electric music and every combination thereof. But the windows were dim and the doors were locked and the books lay sleeping in false dreams, their keepers gone to the same place Dan had fixed his eye. The Oggestalt.

It rose in a looming thrust, glimmering white and sparked all over with lights, a stereotomic mass breaking the edges of the eye’s perception. As if the everlasting sky had been turned on its edge and wrapped and folded into a building, layer upon layer, line upon line, precept upon precept its top vanishing far above the buildings around it. A white ziggurat kissing the sky, hovering in place, balanced beyond understanding or ability, a true wonder of MOG. It was beautiful like bleached bones are beautiful, but Dan felt heavy when he looked at it.

He knew it was beautiful, It sparkled in the light of eternal dawn like a tooth free and liberated from its jaw. It was beautiful, everyone said it was beautiful. Everyone knew it was beautiful. But his stomach tried to wriggle up behind his heart every time he saw it. Shouldn’t the sky be blue? The childhood imagining had been growing stronger, he used to imagine the sky as some other color than it was and blue was always his favorite, no, the sky was gray and hard like it had been and always would be; glory be to MOG.

“It’s just so beautiful!” Mattie said, tossing her pink hair.

Dan looked at her and her hazy eyes, her face slathered with makeup, pale white like bones. For a moment she was hideous to him. Like a thing pressed and molded and folded until it was a mockery of itself.

“Yeah, sure, let’s just get inside.”

They marched toward the massive iron doors that stood open at the Oggestalt’s base, light pulsating to deep, bass, beats emanated from within accompanied by the electric cry of guitars. He needed a drink, to dance and forget and pretend he wasn’t going mad and that Mattie was actually beautiful and the Megapolis and the sky and the labyrinth of streets were too. How could he long for anything more?

The song ended as they passed through the doors and into the cavernous ballroom filled with a panoply of colored dresses and men’s suits and food and drink and light. The dull underhumm of voices and footsteps vibrated in the damp, sweaty air like the breath of some sleeping giant. They found their place for the next dance, and swirled and swayed face to face amongst the thousand other people there, a symphony of electric instruments and tones filling them to their bones.

Mattie laughed, Dan grimaced.

“OH SMILE!” She shouted through slurring lips.

Her hair had been blonde before, he had liked her with blonde hair, the pink just made her seem like this place and the sky. No, they were all beautiful. And he hated them all.

“STILL NEED THAT DRINK?” he shouted back.

Mattie furiously shook her head and her hair. “NO! I NEED TO DANCE!”

“Well I need it.” He let go of her hands and turned away searching for the nearest bar. She didn’t follow.

He saw it all morphing. The music became unbearable, the weight of the building and the sky and the light in the air filling the city pressed down against him. There was a lie behind it all and that lie was the fear and that fear was why the people danced and the light was eternal.

He ordered his drink and looked around at the people, they all knew it, but they ignored it, and he despised them. Reality was a prison, this city was a cage, this dance was a distraction, this building the same as those houses of vice he had passed and despised others for entering. And the sky! The sky was a lid welded to a barrel and they all were inside with the lights blinking down on them and MOG laughing madly because he alone knew the secret.

“Dante Bergeron?” The voice was like a chime falling into his ears, he looked up from his drink. She was beautiful, not like Mattie was beautiful, honestly beautiful, her skin glowed with its own shine and the stern glory of her face captivated his attention.

“Yeah.” He said stupidly and smiled. “But you can call me Dan if you care to sit down.” He gestured to the empty stool beside him. She stood where she was in her shimmering tight fitting jacket and didn’t smile back.

“Come with me, The Prism wants to see you.” the woman said.

“You aren’t The Prism?” Dan asked with mock disappointment.

“No, I am not, this way mister Bergeron.” She turned striding towards the nearest wall, Dan noticed she was dressed all in black.

“I didn’t mean to see any Prism!”

She turned smoothly with an annoyed look on her face. “Indeed, no one ever ‘means’ to see The Prism. You are simply seen by him and he wants to see you. Now come along, you have no choice in it.”

The holo-tats on Dan’s forearms turned red and the word “COME” appeared in glowing itching letters in his skin. He dropped his drink, and felt his blood thicken as it drained down from his face. The woman smiled. He followed her. The music was slow and a saxophone’s mournful voice shrilled the heavy air.

There were several elevators set in a row in the gleaming white wall each with golden doors polished like mirrors. Everyone ignored them, afraid. The black clad woman walked up to one and typed a short furious combination on its keypad, the doors snapped open instantly and silently. They stepped inside, Dan could see Mattie’s red dress sparking and flaming as she danced with a man he couldn’t make out before the doors blinked shut and a high wine with the sick sensation of unseen, rapid movement dizzied his ears.

The whirring stopped. The doors leapt open without a sound onto a long shiny-black hall that grew wider the further it went, pooled here and there with a greasy, emerald light spilling from sconces in the walls.

“Go on!” the woman said and her voice seemed loud enough here to shatter the ceiling. “He’s waiting for you.”

Dan stepped out the door slowly, his footstep clicking discordantly on the black floor. “You aren’t coming with…” he turned just in time to see the golden doors snap shut with unnerving silence. He was alone. He breathed deep and slowly, his heart hummed and his blood vibrated and his every muscle felt alive and waiting to be proven. He grinned in spite of himself. He knew the world. Knew the Megapolis and its people and its fears but this was something new. He knew little of the Oggestalt beyond its ground floor and the once monthly dances that were held there and that the shadows along the edges sometimes moved and sometimes people went to those dances and never returned. Maybe they had found themselves here, on the edge of discovery, these upper floors were a mystery, only the faceless Khaosnauts came and went from here and they never spoke of what they saw.

He took a few cautionary steps and stopped ears humming fuzzy static in the dampening silence, not a sound save himself broke the stillness of the place. He should be panicking, wasn’t that what most people would do? But curiosity and a thrill he had not felt since his last year as a child held him and steadied his heart. He straightened his back and slowly marched down the silent, black hall. That part of him that longed for oblivion or a grand struggle was awake and alive and he felt the precious beauty of every second. The whole glory of life in a chain of glittering moments.

The hallway had grown to a square cavern now, its ceiling disappearing beyond the reach of the resigned lights into yawning blackness that fell and pooled in the center of the cave before him, flanked by the sickly, green lights. He bared his teeth in a smile at the looming darkness and walked toward its unyielding center, heart drumming.

A rectangle of light appeared to his left, a door silently swinging open, breaking the perfect smoothness of the wall.

“Come in my boy!” a voice called, Dan walked toward the door. He blinked the new room into focus, the colors were pink and gold with a dully glowing emerald floor and matching lamp shade on a desk at the other end of the room. Behind the desk, partially obscured by the shade of the lamp, sat a man in every way like a brick; his frame was large and square and his suit was a dusty orange-red and a cigar was clamped between his glimmering teeth, its smoke rising to mix with the gray tangle of his hair.

“Please, sit,” he gestured Dan to the chair across the desk from him and then slid a small box of cigars toward him.

“No, thank you.”

The man shrugged and smiled leaning back in his chair, “Someday you’ll appreciate them. And I know that.” smoke wafted out of his smile. “You’re special my boy, that’s why you’re here, very special. Do you dream often?”

Dan raised his eyebrows but felt no surprise, he was beyond feelings, simply alive and aware of every cell in his body. “Yes, I dream.”

“Of course. You know what happens if people don’t dream, don’t you? They forget, their minds cannot take in the fullness of the day and store it away to catalog the life of the person. What are our personalities after all if not the distilled aggregate of all our experiences, the interconnected grid of relations that provide the imaginational framework by which we navigate the world. But if you don’t dream… well… you go insane, you don’t remember, and your reality begins to crumble in on you like sand. Those connections and relations evaporate and you become nothing more than an empty body, we used to call such creatures animals but you don’t know what those were, do you Dante?”

Dan shook his head.

No, you wouldn’t, only The Machine remembers.

At the word “Machine” a chill ran down Dan’s spine, the way it was said triggered something in his mind, a shape in his subconscious.

“And you probably don’t know how we know all these things about men and women and their dreams and their minds do you? No, but tell me this: what did you dream, Mister Bergeron? What did you dream?” he leaned back in this chair and smiled again.

Dan allowed himself to remember, the darkness, the walls, the golds, blues, greens and red like no other thing. The dread and the pressing, invisible weight, the shape he couldn’t define but knew was always there, shrouded and looming. These were the flavors of his dreams, and they haunted his waking hours with increasing subtlety, he wasn’t sure even this room and the brick colored man weren’t a dream as well. He opened his mouth to say as much but the man interrupted him.

“It’s all right, we told you what to dream, we can do that you see. You know the other purpose of dreams Dante? They fulfill our deepest desires, and if used correctly can be the source of those desires as well. Dante Burgeron, what is it you want?” He paused a second, his small clear eyes tearing at Dan’s face, he raised his hand again before Dan could speak. “No, we know what you dreamed, we know what you want. You, Dante Bergeron, in your factory and your occupation and your well ordered life we provided for you. Fame, You dreamt of fame. A big, shiny buzzy guitar and you playing it. All the women, all the virtues, all the love and fulfillment you could wish for showering down onto you on stage. You the star, and they your universe.”

Dan laughed and shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that!” It had been years since any dream remotely to the man’s description had entered his sleeping mind.

The man exhaled a thick sheen of smoke and leaned forward almost laying on his desk. “Then what did you dream?”

“Are you The Prism? The woman at the elevator said I was to see The Prism.”

“What did you dream?” his eyes were thirsty with the intent of the question.

Dan scratched his chest, “see, I meant to see The Prism and I would like to do what I mean too.” He smiled at his own stupid joke.

“Yes I am The Prism,” the man said, leaning back and his chair groaned. “Now tell me what you dreamt. It’s alright, you’ll not be harmed by it if you tell me now. What. Did. You. Dream?”

He had always imagined The Prism to be smaller, he shrugged trying to ignore the nightmare chill slinking its way up his spine. “I dreamt I was on top my apartment block and everything was dead quiet, then I heard a roar and a huge crack appeared across the sky, it split it right in half and a bright light shone through it and drowned out all the lights in the sky.”

The brick shaped man stared at him unblinking, his square gleaming teeth cutting slowly into the cigar.

“I felt myself rise off the ground, I saw the buildings around me warp and fracture into dust in a roaring, swirling cloud draining up into the sky and the light.” Dan couldn’t keep the jagged edge out of his voice at the memory. “I fell up. The light and the dust burned my eyes and peeled my skin and thunder tore at my chest, but it was laughter not thunder.” He could feel the wind again, sparks of the fear fizzled and popped in his blood and sweat bloomed slowly on his brow.

“Is that all?” The Prism asked his voice saying he knew it wasn’t

“No, there’s another. I see… chaos. The world round, thin, a delicate pod adrift on tumult of colors. Waves roaring and winds howling beneath a black sky with a thousand points of silver light. All focused here. “He tapped the desk. “It’s all trying to break this. It rages and batters and then I change. I realize I’m standing on a tower and I’m yelling into the wind, laughing. Cheering the waves and the lights on lending my will to the attack and I feel…” he locks eyes with the man behind the desk and the lampshade and the smoke. “Alive. I realize my heart is racing, filling my veins with music and glory. Then I see the sky begin to grow red and orange and finally gold and a single great light fills it and I see the storm stop and the waves freeze melting into a solid landscape. The world moves. But the world is hideous now.” Dan’s heart was racing, he’d barely allowed himself to remember let alone speak of this. “It’s a gray and hard ball, covered all over with stains and streaks on its uneven and leering hull. It stands like something dead on the static, color-filled plain that surrounds it, in the dream it gives me an overwhelming sense of dread and loathing. As if this thing is some great eye cut loose from its head and rolling here degrading the beauty of this place. But I know at the same time that what I am seeing is the world and that somewhere inside of it, infinitely small I lay asleep in my bed beneath a hard gray sky and my entire body roils at the thought. Then I feel my mind stir, I know I will wake soon. I take one last look at the world, the Megapolis shell and can see it growing, leeching all the color from the surrounding universe into itself and swelling like an inflamed belly.”

Dante leaned back in his chair staring at The Prism wondering if his eyes were as empty as his smile was. “Did you tell me to dream all that oh all knowing man?”

The large man’s small eyes were hard as diamonds in his ruddy face, glinting behind a thinning cloud of cigar smoke. He stood up towering a head and shoulders above Dante. “Come with me dear boy.”

They walked out into the hallway and toward the glowing golden elevator doors, a calm lay over Dante unlike anything he had known for years, since before the dreams had begun. A weight had slowly grown upon him in that time, unnoticed, pressing against his spine and lungs as swirling shapes had filled his night mind, unconfessed, simmering like forgotten tea. Now it was gone, dissipated into the glowing air of The Prism’s office and he felt light as if he could run down the hall into the darkness and burst through the invisible wall he knew lurked somewhere in the blackness. Shattering through the Oggestalts side and flying among the white rubble high above the amber streets, free, alive and immortal. But curiosity unfamiliar and joyous filled him impetuously. He wanted to know where this man would take him. He clenched and quickly loosed his fist, he could break the man’s jaw if he had to, and he was sure he could outrun him wherever they went. The way he felt right now? He could probably fight five men and win.

They were at the golden doors, then in the elevator, thick fingers dancing across the reflecting keypad and the buzzing hum deep within Dante’s ears as the elevator moved rapidly through the bowels of the Oggestalt. He could feel The Prism glaring down at him from under heavy eyelids, he shuffled his feet and scratched his neck trying to act careless.

“You’re a Diamond my boy and you shine particularly bright. Tell me: when was the last time you looked at the sky?”

He looked up at The Prism and thought about lying. “An hour ago.”

“Yes”, the large man rolled the word around in his mouth as if savoring its texture. “The first people of the world couldn’t stand it, our ancestors regarded it with a sort of dread even though they knew it is the shield guarding the game of their lives; did you know that?”

Dante’s ears popped, the elevator hummed like a runner’s heart, he shook his head.

“No, of course you didn’t, those dim ideas of the world’s first generation were dreamt away, offered to MOG’s oblivion and gladly given.”

“But you know about them.”

The Prism smiled, or rather continued to smile. “Of course my boy, the Machine remembers.”

That chill rippled across Dante’s skin again at the word, he clenched his fists at his side, swallowing his fear, trying to grasp the easy and relaxed way he was in the streets, “where are we going?”

“To the sky, to the skull of the world through its spine.” The words hung heavy in the enclosed, humming air.

He could feel the elevator slowing now, the trembling through the soles of his feet decreasing in frequency until his own quivering muscles replaced its rattle in his head, the doors slid open to a vast room full of dull silver light. The line of sight stretched out before them as they stepped out of the elevator, pipes and interwoven modules of dull metal glimmered and wriggled on the ceiling and walls interspersed with small plaques and slow throbbing lights. This guttural sprawl seeped down from the ceiling and up from the floor connecting the two, forming the matrix that Dante could feel stretching out in every direction from them slowly curving with the sky until it joined together again somewhere far below his feet, the decaying sweetness of the air tickled the back of his throat. There were sounds all around, felt as much as heard, a humming and whirring and wailing and dead thrusting like muscles rippling over one another in a huge arm and he, some barely comprehending parasite. A shrieking sound echoed deep from all around like the electric wailing of a guitar slowly converging upon him and The Prism, the sound blending and swirling until it dripped darky into the words of a belaboured metalic voice.

welcome my son to the machine

“What… What is this.”

“The world.” The Prism said.

i am the machine without end without beginning the world that rides the khaos

The voice chilled Dante to the pit of his stomach and pooled there cold and heavy, he looked up at the grinning man as the air slowly throbbed around them.

“You’ve dreamt this my boy! Or near enough, follow me.” The man turned and strode confidently as a cinder block down one of the corridors, light glimmering greasily in his hair. “This was all built years ago, to ensure the propagation of the species.”

lies

The moaning electronic voice cracked in the air.

the machine had no beginning it has no end it is always present and never not time was constructed by its logic and without it is nothing that is not khaos i am the machine

“Don’t mind him,” The Prism called back. “He’s sensitive to blasphemous truths against himself.”

“What is it?” Dante asked, his eyes darting. “The voice.”

i am the machine i am all i am existence

“The voice of the reality dear boy,” the large man had stopped in front of a door with a large wheel set in amongst the flood of pipe and metal that seemed alive. He opened it and stepped inside, Dante followed and fell to his knees screaming. He had stepped into nothing, the entire city was spread out two miles below him, the Megapolis and its buildings like bristles in the mouth of a nightmare yawning up to catch his body and grind it bloody. But no air rushed past his ears, no wind plastered his shirt to his skin like some suicide diver as he had seen countless times before. He was on something solid, glass or transparent metal.

“Beautiful isn’t it?” The Prism’s deep voice said from above him, his eyes sparkled greedily with the washed amber light. “It was made for humanity, the perfect city, the perfect home. A light amongst the darkness with MOG to protect us from Khaos. Here, we are free.”

Dante sat up gasping, his legs and arms still trembling and heart nearly humming.

“But you, my boy, you saw it. The darkness, the lie. Your mind could grasp beyond ‘reality’ itself and sense the true nature. Most people can feel it you know, the nagging, the counterfeit of all they behold but cannot give words to what they intuit. And we, I can assure you, have done all in our power to keep those words from them. But then there are the Diamonds. The ones who dream.” He offered a hand to Dante and stood him on his shaking legs as the voice wailed again.

there is no lie there is no false the machine is all the machine is true the machine is the primary principle and the final cause the human is but the atoms the temporary form of matter in the machine and the machine endures

The Prism ignored the electric voice and continued. “We rule this place, we are the oil of MOG and MOG in turn is bent to our will. Reality is yours to command, you see it all below you, you can forge dreams, enact all to your principal and live like a king of the forgotten bygone. What do you say? We can go far. You can have anything within your desire, any woman, any toy, any virtue, any vice, anything.

Dante stood shaking with energy, looking from the Prism’s beaming face to the buildings spread out below him. To the side he could see the Oggestalt, that white terror bridging world and sky. He could see the streets of colored light where the crowds dispersed after a day of working, he could see the top of his apartment block and the very place he had stood in his dream when he saw the crack in the sky. He was in that crack now, in the peripheral. The border of reality and beyond, outside… beauty. No, out there was the Khaos, the outer darkness. The sea of madness on which the world floated, a vortex of horror and inconsequential fury from which MOG had protected them for all time. Below was what was real. But also all around him, and the beyond… no, there was nothing in the beyond. He looked down again past his feet, somewhere down there Mattie and her pink hair were dancing and drinking and sparking while all around the populace frittered away its mind on distraction while he, like MOG, looked down and laughed.

“What’s the Joke?” The Prism asked.

Dante looked him in the eye and laughed again. “There’s nothing down there either.”

A flicker of confusion crossed the large man’s face, Dante looked down and laughed again. Maybe he could fly. And the door to this room locked from the outside. In a snap moment he looked back up at The Prism, he had leaned down as if to puzzle out the source of mirth through the floor, and punched him in the jaw as hard as he could. The bones in his hand rattled and shifted like metal pellets in a sack and glorious true pain shot through his arm. The man stumbled back dazed and fell with a hard thump onto the clear floor. Dante was out the door and spinning the wheel to lock it then running. Running and running. His feet pounded on the metal floor as the walls sped by around him with their blinking and whirring and clicks and moans. He was laughing again, free. Free like one of his dreams. Free in the skin of the sky in the place between places. In the shell of existence racing to find a beauty he had only imagined and which could be no more than death.

there are no cracks for you to exploit the machine is perfect in its execution and all-encompassing in its existence there are no weaknesses to find it is absolute i am absolute i am the machine

The voice taunted Dante as he ran and he laughed at it.

fool

There were other footsteps now echoing down the metal veins and capillaries of this labyrinth. Scrambled electronic voices, he saw one of them in a branching side passage, his helmet glinting in the dull light, Khaosnaut.

“NO!” he shouted as he ran. “THERE IS BEAUTY BEYOND, I’LL NOT BE KEPT HERE!”

beauty is a construct of man it is a deception it is a word of the weak to give merit to their lives the machine exists outside the boundaries of your perception it is perfect form and you are a fool to think you will ever escape the boundaries i have placed on you

Dante stopped running, his breathing heavy and body shaking, sweat poured from him and soaked his shirt. He felt like singing. “Something had to give your boundaries,” he gasped. “And if you have boundaries then I can go beyond them. I can go beyond you!” he studied the ceiling with its pipes and cables, they had to go somewhere.

The wailing metal voice held a tone of contempt

you believe that because something created me that you can somehow escape me you are nothing more than my creation given form you cannot exist without me and if you wish to go beyond me then go and see how that takes you it is far better to exist were you are welcome and in my care than where there is nothing but khaos and madness

Strong arms grabbed Dante and held him tight from behind. He yelled and raged like a madman feeling armor plates press into his back. Another Khaosnaut stepped into the passage in front of him, baton in hand, his reflection stretched oddly on his blank helmet.

no do not harm him

The voice of reality said.

he desires to see beyond take him and let him see

The Khaosnauts grabbed each of his arms and marched down the passageway, the lights on the wall blinking in a wave as they went like the muscles of an intestine. Dante had fought but now half stumbling, walked along with them. He was laughing.

They came to an elevator, perhaps it was the same one, the doors were gold. They entered and the gloved hand of a Khaosnaut drummed the keypad and the whirring and bone deep vibration rattled Dante’s skull. It stopped suddenly. They stood for a moment in the gold plated box with only the sound of their breathing. The lights went out. Dante could feel tears on his cheeks but he wasn’t sure why. He had stopped laughing. There was a soft click as the doors slid open and cold washed over his sweat soaked skin, biting and harsh. The Khaosnauts drug him forward, feet invisible in the darkness.

Blackness. Complete. Without beginning or end, the Khaosnauts let go of his arms and stepped away. Nothing, the only sensations were the cold gnawing at his nerves and the solid feel of something under his feet. He remembered his holo-tats and held his forearm up in front of his face, willing them to light up but there was nothing, only darkness.

The air was clear, like purified water. He imagined steam coming from his mouth when he breathed like looking into a freezer, the air stung his lungs and drew small gasps from them but it was good, familiar. He’d dreamt this before… squinting he stared into the void.

There. He saw it. A single point of light, then another and another slowly focusing into place until the whole sky was sprinkled with them, a million points of light pure and wavering gently and memory stirred somewhere deep in his blood.They were eyes, they had a name, but he only knew his own.

“There is beauty here.” he croaked and shook with painful laughter. The hard steps of the Khaosnauts pounded up behind him as he laughed and they shoved. Dante stumbled forward and fell, the ground sloped away in the near blackness and he slid down rolling and gaining momentum clawing wildly for any hold on the smooth dark surface. Faster and faster, sliding, his stomach jumped up beside his hammering heart and he plunged off into darkness. A mind hovering in the void, for a moment he imagined he was the only thing in existence, beyond reality, he alone the world and all there was but it was a lie. He was flying.

Overhead the lights moved in the sky too slow for any observer to see, they moved like a great wheel; sure and patient, their names known only to those who remember.