Lights burst before my eyes; a sharp crack split the air and time slowed. Down I went: my cheek slapped into sharp gravel, my legs crumpled like split twigs, and my wings flopped to my sides like damp tissue paper.
I rolled, tried to get up, and found that I could not. A heavy boot was stomped to my back, squeezing my ribs, and I saw stars against the dusty pavement. A roar took over my ears, then, and the tang of dust and iron cloyed my mouth and nose.
The boot moved and hands grabbed at my ankles, dragged me into a dark damp place with a smoother floor. The roar grew louder, the scrape of my skin against the floor like a thousand iron raindrops against my chest, and my eardrums tore and bled.
Gunshots rang through and snapped the thin calcium of my legs.
I did not know. I could not feel pain.
The formulae I had gone over at work ran through my head, tantalizing in distraction. Fleeting words, too, of last night’s book lingered in my mind like lost songbirds and begged to be considered – a story, a faded memory of a crowd, the taste of morning’s breakfast (or was that the vomit, working its way through my teeth?) all swam like fish in a bloody pond. Distractions. And my dim, horrified mind did not reject them.
I, a middling businessman who went by the name of Jeb, lay in the sodden dirt, muddy-faced and lying broken-winged in a pool of sweat and blood and bile. I smelled it, tasted it, and I could not see because my eyes would not open and were leaking liquid that was not just tears.
I did not move. I did not try.
There were footsteps and I twitched, and when those heavy footfalls sounded by my ear, when my feathered crest was yanked roughly upward so I could see through bleary lidded eyes the snotty, puffy face of someone with nothing to lose, someone with a dented iron rod in one hand and the rotting effects of a tangled skull and rose in the other, I only whimpered my fear, nothing more.
Sounds caressed the air, fell from spittle-flecked lips puffy with injection filler and rub-on Listerium, and when I did not respond, my head was let fall back to the dirt.
The thick rubber sole of a boot stamped roughly between my wings and I heard a sound like a crackling tesla tree. I coughed out a shallow breath and the weight increased, and I found that I could not draw air.
Death, when you cannot feel, is quite like sleep.
My name was Jeb. Pronounced like Yeb, I always told my boss, but she always pronounced it like Jeb, and in company meetings she always called me James, for reasons she gave that I could never quite remember. I had a boyfriend, a man about my age whom I had met through the university, one almost close enough to for me to call him husband. My boyfriend and I had not lived together, but we might have. We had discussed it cordially over dinner, in a fancy restaurant called Nook’s Branch in one of the larger skyrise-pines that filled the city.
The sunset that night was like purple wine, filtering in through the titanic trees and aging metal monolith buildings in a picturesque portfolio of the world. The kiss we shared that night had been sublime, and the ring he presented was a soft buttery gold.
Something kicked my temple, the world blackened and my head lolled, and the foot came back down again to rest heavily on my fragile skull. And it was in that sad moment that I, a man called Jeb, a man whose name was pronounced like Yeb and with a boyfriend and the recipient of prenatal avian genetic therapy and who was the daughter-turned-son of a lawyer and a doctor, the man who became a middle-income therapist of nearly forty first-sun years in experience and twice that in RNA therapy memories, felt my heart stop beating.
“Do you know yourself.”
My head reeled and the street was gone. Spittle and chunky vomit clung to my lips and hair; I drooled on the ground, lips puffy and useless, wings splayed at my sides.
But I was not dead, and I was not on the street, and I did not hurt.
The first thing I, a pile of flesh that felt already on the verge of rot, noticed was the quiet. There were no sirens, no humming tesla generators, no whip-whup-whup of the giant wind farms and helicopters that flooded the underhang of the city like so many hanging nets and flies. Here, there was nothing.
But for light, red and veiny through heavy eyelids. I was delirious, I thought, and dizzy with the sudden putting-together of my body.
It took a long time for me to start moving, but when I did, it was only touched with the aching, hungry feeling of impending doom and release of death. And of that doom, there was none.
I lifted my head, slowly moved my aching corpus. The air was dead, flat, and chokingly thick with salt and the smell of rotting kelp in the sun. I, half-risen to standing, body aching but not bleeding, did not wonder where I was, and I moved to standing.
The hall was golden, too bright. I felt at my limbs, rotated my wrists and wings, and I beheld… well.
All my life, I had heard of seas of grain, and each time I scoffed at the idea. It seemed ludicrous that grain, as large as it was, could form something as coherent and seamless as a golden sea, complete with waves, but that is what I saw here.
Only this sea was narrow and located inside a high, endless cathedral hall.
The hall was grey. There were no tapestries, no wall hangings, no windows. It was strangely suffocating, in that sense. All my life, I had only ever been in buildings with windows. Architects take great pains to make even the smallest space seem big, be that by putting in windows, installing mirrors, or fitting interior walls such that the space feels enough to live in.
Not here. The walls – the ones I could see – would take minutes to reach if I walked from one end to the other. And yet it felt smaller than anywhere I had ever been before.
I breathed, focused. Where was I? The space felt familiar, in that storybook sort of way, but there was no sign that anyone had been here before save for the uniform golden wheat and the space immediately around me. There, I crouched, brushed over where I had been lying, felt at the crushed stalks where I had writhed in the soil in my – death throes? Resurrection spasms? I did not know.
Resurrection. I felt at my limbs once again, touched over my feathers and face, and the panicked ache in my chest, the bubbling, gurgling hate and bile and fear from my death faded like morning mist before the glory of the sun. I knew where I was, felt it in the golden sunlight from its radiant invisible source and the great stone and metal walls of the endless cathedral.
I was in the loop of Resurrection.
Resurrection was a thought experiment, like Russel’s Teapot or Roko’s Basilisk. Found between cultures, strangely enough, but just an idea. However, when one finds themselves in a living idea, it is hard to deny its truth.
I breathed with a chest that was not numb and did not hurt, and the air smelled like grain and fresh-tilled soil.
We called it Resurrection. A simple, elegant name.
I strained my memory, My college education had not, as I was told it would, beaten the creativity out of me, nor had it dried my wellspring of curiosity to seek new and interesting things. Rather, it had made me so busy, so bloated with a glut of fresh information and busywork, that I found myself without the time or energy to be engaged with life in my free time. So, suffice it to say, I did not remember much about Resurrection.
But as I looked about the superstructure with all its reddish-gold wheat and rich loamy soil and thick still air that smelled inexplicably like salt and kelp, I started to remember. Memories trickled back in, just as they do when you drive past your old childhood home and remember all the plants you grew in the garden.
“Do you remember what happened.”
There was a rumbling in the air, subliminal in its frequency like a whale call, more felt than heard. It vibrated in my chest like a low groan and trembled the wheat, making a rattling hush that shhhhed all the way through the hall until it sounded like the crashing of a tidal wave. I crouched, I do not know why, and endured, and then all at once, the roar – that is what it was, a roar – faded away, leaving silence and stirred motes of glimmering dust in its wake.
How strange.
There are times in life when one gains a sense of direction, a sudden spark of inkling progression that tells you where to go, an almost visible lightbulb above your head. Now was one of those times.
With nothing else to do but watch the grain and think my thoughts, I picked a direction – the direction where the shadows pointed left – parted the wheat, and started walking.
This is what I remembered about Resurrection.
Resurrection was a thought experiment from a long time ago. Its idea, like Russell’s Teapot, was that there was an object in space that we could not disprove the existence of and therefore could hypothetically exist. Only, unlike Russell’s Teapot, it was not very small.
It was a ring around the Sun.
The idea had evolved over time, of course. According to ancient documents from back before we knew the solar system to be heliocentric, Resurrection was a vast citadel, a long elaborate hallway, made of indestructible metal and filled with an infinite amount of food. This hall orbited the Earth as a great spinning ring, too far out for us to see, and held the Sun in alignment, allowing it to rise and set in the right spot every day. Distortions in the ring were, according to those documents, what explained the seasons – the ring had been a perfect circle, when it was created by the Deities Above, but the Sun was hot and twisted the metal over time until the seasons arose through its warping.
Whole religions birthed and died over the idea that the ring would keep warping, that it would, in time, destroy itself or warp so far that we would have years of chilled darkness and superheated summers, like the poles on steroids, and that we needed to travel to the ring from the outside to fix it.
The outside, of course, was the problem.
All of the original documents – “original”, of course, because nobody knew whether the few documents we had were originals or adaptations – stated that people went to the Resurrection when they died.
The eerie thing that kept archaeologists up at night was that the idea of Resurrection – down to the type of grain growing in the floor – existed across the globe. The idea of gods was understandable, as were creation myths: in the absence of science, we come up with stories. We fill the gap. But everywhere in the world, at some point or another, there were stories of Resurrection, detailed through primitive cave scrawlings, handpainted drawings, proto-literature. All detailed the stretching corridor, the great pillars, the black starry ceiling, and the endless sea of wheat.
It kept archaeologists up at night. Or so claimed the people who rambled about unexplained phenomena on the internet late at night. A subculture which, unfortunately, I had recently been a part of.
I thought over all of this as I walked through the rustling grain. Wheat seeds and husks littered my shoes, filled the soles in such a way that I had to stop occasionally to empty them out. I had thought, more than once, that I should try to fly – the air was clear, there were no obstructions – but when I had tried hours ago, I had found the air to be too still, unworkable for my city-adapted wings.
All my life, I had flown on artificial thermals and updrafts, and now that I needed to work my own breeze, I found myself incapable. It was rather like if I had only walked my whole life and now had to run a marathon. And so I went, wingtips dragging in the endless golden sea, and I kept walking.
The air rumbled again.
“Do you know yourself.”
I was sitting against a wall, had been for the last few minutes. I was tired, my legs aching. But yet I felt no hunger, no thirst, no need for sleep. It was a bodily tiredness, nothing more, and I needed but a few minutes to sit and rest before I could keep walking.
I had worried a few minutes (or was it hours?) ago about keeping to the right direction. Both ends of the cathedral looked the same, even the path where I had parted the wheat – where I had stepped, the wheat moved back within minutes. I had decided that, in case I forgot the direction I was walking toward, I would know by the lines I drew in the dirt where I sat.
I kept my feet pointed the way I was going, too, in case the soil was as regenerative and marless as the wheat.
The air rumbled again.
“Do you hear me.”
Whatever it was, it had no meaning. To my ears, the words – if that is what they were – were noises, senseless vibrations. They floated through the still, quiet air like sonar under the waves. But it was a question, and I knew it as such. I just couldn’t hear it.
The sound, though, had renewed my senses. I stood, stretched my stiff muscles, and moved.
Resurrection was said to be a living sun, a great big ball of molten plasma that had connected in just the right ways to form neurons, or something like them. It survived by jettisoning material, re-absorbing it, and repeating until movement occurred. It ate planets to survive, hunting them down through speed and patience over the course of millennia.
But eventually, the stories said, after its millionth or so world devoured to its heart, Resurrection gained enough sentience to grow a consciousness. And when it had done that, in the midst of devouring yet another planet, it realised what it had done.
Resurrection stopped chewing the planet and slowly, carefully spat it out. In its belly, it could not feel the ones it had swallowed, but it knew that it had eaten life. It knew like how one knows on waking that they had had nightmares, had cried through the night even when the tears are dry come morning. In this way, Resurrection knew that it had eaten not one, not ten, but hundreds upon thousands of living worlds. These planets had been filled with people like us, and they had lived and thrived until a ball of searing flame and plasma had come along and destroyed them, melted them to fuel, and devoured even the flickering traces they might have left behind when they died out.
Whole people, exterminated, and whole worlds of those who might have once held life, too, extinguished.
Resurrection pondered this slowly, through its fiery tears, over millennia. The rock that it had dropped in its horror cooled in orbit nearby.
A few more millennia came and went, and Resurrection, in its slow, newly ponderous ways, crafted a great metal structure, heavy and dense and strong enough to survive many many lifetimes and proximity to its heat. It wove this structure in the net of its belly, spat out great globules of rapidly-cooling titanium to close orbit, and sculpted those globules to form a great hollow metal ring, for Resurrection was both an architect and a scholar. Resurrection, too, was thoughtful and knew that living things needed atmosphere and a way to get there.
Resurrection remembered with a heavy core the ways it had so carelessly devoured the hearts and minds of trillions, and Resurrection decided that nobody – nobody – in its system would be allowed to die.
“Do you understand me.”
The voice spoke and I loathed it. It was a nauseating feeling, a pooling of blood and bile rising in my throat, acidy, eating ribbons into my tender throat. But it was not my hate, really.
I was walking, still, a gentle heart and a gentler mind in a carefree golden field of endless summer, and listened, and the voice went on, a dull rumble like the fading roar after lightning’s thunder.
“Do you remember me.”
“Yes,” I said, and my mouth gummed with blood as I spoke, sticky and rotting.
It was instant. The walls sucked away and a pinprick of light flared to glory and brilliance before my eyes. I opened my mouth to scream, to shout, to yell my horror, but it was too late. I was going, gone.
It was a beautiful day, and I felt the strangest sense of déjà vu. I went to the clinic, as I always did, said my greetings to my coworkers, chatted idly with the secretaries. I listened to the news that day, the talk of a burgeoning population and the new space satellites to seek the stars, felt a pulse behind my eyes for a brief, sharp, lurching moment. For the smallest speck of a second, I saw in my mind’s eye an endless hallway, gently arching so slowly that the curve could not be seen, filled with tall golden grain –
And I snapped back, faintly dizzy and wondering why. I chuckled to myself, idly, and looked at the clock. It was almost time to go home, and I thought about my route from work.
There are times in life when one feels guided, steered, like they have a lightbulb over their head that they themselves did not make. It is a strange, surreal thing, and for some odd reason, it did not feel like the first time that day that I had had the feeling.
I, a man called Jeb with a name pronounced like Yeb, felt another lurch of déjà vu roll through me. But it passed, and I sat back in my chair, and when it did not come back, I relaxed.
It did have an effect, though. Today, I decided, I would not fly through the city. The city was a metallic path, one that went through one of those old places from before the Solar Cities, and dangerous. I flew over it almost every day anyway. It was quicker, not covered by the great water-shedding boughs of the towering redwood trees, and my home was just on the other side of it.
But today, I would fly safe. It was supposed to rain, after all, and I did not want to fly in a storm.
And something in the back of my mind whispered that I had written this all before.