Chapter 34 part 1

Background color
Font
Font size
Line height

Chapter 34

William rolled over the eave and tumbled onto the roof.  Climbing up from the street had taken nearly an hour.  Even with the fog thick around him and The Caretaker at his left side, William had barely been able to walk from the alley where the young man had left him to the apartment building.

The Hunter stood over him as he lay there.  The voices had been quiet during the trip, but he had known they were urging him this direction.  Finally, they wanted him here, near Jessica's apartment.

He chuckled.  She was nearby, and yet he had never been farther from getting her back.  He was exhausted, filthy, burned and probably dying.  Jess wouldn't come anywhere near him.  She'd made that clear the night before.

He looked across the roof, could only see the top of Jessica's building over the far side.  He started to push himself up, but stopped.  There didn't seem to be much point in keeping watch when he couldn't walk or climb down.  Maybe the voices just wanted him to die up here.

The Advisor stood over him, looked down.  Soon.

Rest while you can, The Caretaker said.

"What for?" William asked.  The week since he had assaulted Dr. Westen and escaped from the hospital had been nothing but pain; pain that had escalated, spread and left him crippled.  He lived in filth, ate from trash bins.  Whatever the voices wanted, he didn't think he could do it.  And, he didn't think he'd want to.

Be ready, The Hunter said.

William looked between them all.  The Hunter paced the edges of the roof, saw threats that William couldn't.  The Caretaker knelt at his side, masked pain from his conscious mind that he couldn't deal with.  The Advisor stood still, understood connections that William couldn't piece together.

They are coming, The Advisor said.  They are all coming together here.

And you will help them see, The Caretaker said.

William turned his eyes to Jessica's building again.  He stared at it for a moment before exhaustion forced him down into sleep.

*

Bryan brought the hole in the folded paper shape to his lips and blew in a sharp breath of air.  It puffed up and he gently pressed the sides and creases into a little origami cube.  He laid it down on the table along with the others.  He'd had time to finish nine of them while he waited at the bar for Meyers.  His notebook lay on the table beside his half-finished beer, open to his notes on William.

"Aren't you the life of the party?"

He looked up to see Meyers with a beer in each hand, one a deep amber and the other black with a beige head of foam.  "You can't even drink regular beer, can you?" Bryan said.  "Always with the gourmet stuff."

Smiling, Meyers slid into the booth across from him.  "Life is too short for shitty beer.  One of these was going to be for you, but since you owe me a taser and you've already got a beer, I'm gonna say I need it more."

"Was it bad?" Bryan asked.

Half a glass of the stout went down before Meyers answered.  "Hayes had to keep it up for twenty minutes til the D.A. got bored and left.  That man can yell."  He raised his glass of porter in salute.

Bryan clinked it, finished his beer.  Meyers didn't pass the amber over.

"What's with the cubes?" Meyers asked.  "New bar trick I haven't heard of?"

"I used to make them for my son."  Bryan smiled down at the little lined origami shapes.  "He would squish them in his little hands the second I made them."  He looked up and saw Meyers sitting motionless, his glass half raised.

"Sorry.  I..." Meyers stopped.

"No.  It's a good memory.  It's okay."  He picked one of them up.  "This is the analogy."

"What?  For your guy?" Meyers asked.

"Yeah," Bryan said.  "Listen, none of this goes to Hayes, okay?  I'll tell him some, but if he hears everything, he'll fire me.  For sure."

It took a moment, but Meyers nodded.

"Okay."  Bryan paged through his notes.  "I started out with circles, little areas of influence, but groups of circles don't make bigger circles, like squares do.  And then, I realized that two dimensions didn't really show it either."  He took four of the cubes and scrunched them together on the table, then added four more on top.  "You see, the little cubes, together, make a bigger cube.  In one way, it's additive, and in another, they are still just separate parts within the larger structure."

There was only silence from Meyers.

Bryan took it as a positive sign and went on.  He picked a little cube out of the bigger one.  "You and I, we're like this."  He put it back, made the large cube whole again.  "But there's a bigger level.  And if I had more cubes, there'd be an even bigger level, and a bigger one and a bigger one.  All the way up."

Across from him, Meyers finished his first glass, reached for his second.  "Okay.  Cubes."

"You're giving me that look.  Like I'm crazy," Bryan said.

"Yeah, I am."  Meyers took a drink.  "What are the cubes?"

"Save the look.  It's gonna sound crazier."  Bryan picked up his spare cube.  "This could be a lot of things, depends on how you want to look at it.  It could be what we experience, or perceive.  It could be our minds.  And you could divide this cube up into smaller ones; physical sensations, emotions, but this one right here is the important one right now."

"Like our brain."

"That's what the doctor would say," Bryan said.  "But no, not really.  The brain could be like the paper and the mind could be the empty space inside.  But they are different.  Experience is different than the stimuli.  Mind is different from brain."

"Before you really lose me, what doctor?" Meyers asked.

It took Bryan a moment to rewind his thoughts.  "The doctor that was attacked by my escapee.  She's been...a pain in the ass."   He started to physically cringe at his attempt to use her sedatives on William.  That had been stupid.  But he couldn't think of any better way to subdue William.  He didn't know of any way to tackle him physically.  He just had to get Jess to safety, and he knew he'd need help from Meyers and Hayes to get that done right.

"So, the little cubes are like us.  Got it." Meyers said.

Bryan nodded as he snapped his thoughts back.  "Right.  And we're all part of the bigger one."

"The bigger one what?"

"Consciousness, or something like consciousness.  That's an analogy in itself, since that's just the level that we're used to experiencing.  At the larger levels it would be something completely different."  Bryan realized he was speaking quickly, mostly to himself as he continued to reason out how things worked.  He looked at Meyers, shrugged.  "Sorry."

"Yeah," Meyers said.  "So this is like some big mind.  Right?"

Bryan nodded back.

"And what do any of the minds or cubes or empty spaces have to do with your perp?" Meyers asked.

You are reading the story above: TeenFic.Net