Chapter 3

When Sorel saw the synx pause and stretch beside a gleaming brook, he glided downward, alighting on a branch—well out of reach of the cat. His inquisitive eye followed her as she crept to the water’s edge and quietly lapped. When she had finished, she flopped over on her side and stretched again—into her human form. Sorel swooped down from the branch and hopped to stop in the long grass. The next step he took was to unbend as he stood, pulling the hair from his face with his hand.

“Is this the place?” were the first words out of his mouth. She giggled and turned her eyes to the looming peaks of the Atep Mountains.

“No, my dear. We must cross them,” she stated.

“That is no trouble for me, but how will you fare, Amalia?” he asked, a glint in his subversive eyes. She feigned injury.

“If you only knew…” she said and splashed across the stream, emerging a great, golden-feathered eagle. With a few bounds she took to the skies and circled above him, gaining altitude. Sorel hesitated. Her powers, then, were leagues beyond his own. And what would an eagle’s instinct’s do when spying a tasty little blackbird, winging along below her? He decided to test the risk, first. While the woven branches of the forest still offered him aid from the larger, more powerful bird. He took off over the treetops—heading northwest, towards the lowest possible pass.

The speck above him grew smaller and smaller, until she almost disappeared entirely, even with his intensified vision, yet he knew that she could still easily watch him. He attempted to fly naturally, without too much worry—until the speck came swooping downwards, gaining speed and substance. Sorel made his move and dove quickly into the trees, searching immediately for the tightest, most-entangled part of the forest. An interwoven mixture of four or five trees appeared to his right, and he squeezed through the conglomeration and into safety.

From his position, he saw no sign of the eagle and sighed. He hopped beyond the thickest tangles to better his view, but movement behind him caught his eye—an amber serpent reared its head to strike. Sorel dove from the branch just in time and spread his wings to land in a small clearing. The feathers held him long enough for human feet to touch the ground and lips to ask the trees where she was.

Amalia replied, dropping from the same tree. “I am here, my little Sorel.” She ambled towards him, emphasizing her feminine features. “Why do you run?”

“Who are you?” Sorel questioned and stepped backwards.

“Do you not already know?” she flicked her hair behind her ear and blinked her eyes carefully. Sorel tensed and looked behind him. When he looked back, the giant form of a jungle Sanyx bared its fangs and snarled, coiling its powerful hind legs for the pounce. Soren whispered into the still mountain air, calling upon the strength of the forest.

As she lunged forward, two branches swung down and knocked her sideways, and in that same moment Sorel took to the air, weaving through the forest limbs, desperate to escape. The sly synx was back on his trail, sprinting after him through the thinning forest. When Sorel saw the rock fields in front of him, he turned northward, back into the thick of the woods. But Amalia, close behind, used his trick against him and the branches in front of him wove into a natural, impenetrable net around him. They constricted as Amalia whispered him down to the ground. Sorel was himself again when he was set down, and Amalia stood and resumed her feminine form.

“You fly well, Sorel; if only you could fight as well,” she murmured and paced around him. “But I am a huntress: you stood no chance—and now, my fair Sorel, you will pay the price.” She fell forward as the towering Sanyx and smiled wickedly.

Sorel’s eyes shot around his surroundings as she approached, a salivating beast no longer resembling any part of a human. He found what two items he could use: a thorn bush and a beaver nibbled branch. With a small, airy whistle, the thorns leapt from their stems and implanted themselves in the beast’s quivering neck. The Sanyx yelped and jumped backwards, where the stick stood upright and impaled its rear right foot. With another whisper, Sorel stretched the branches, took aerial form and shot from the forest into the great blue of the liberating sky.

The mind-numbing shadow and sudden downdraft that sent him spiraling through the trees and into the rough dirt and shallow grass caught him by surprise. Sorel blinked twice and then dropped into the whelming sea of unconsciousness.

^*^

The next morning fell into the room with swift, soft beams and a host of floating motes; Olin watched them spiral around the hum of the air-conditioner with a mild disinterest. He was glad enough the night had passed. His inability to sleep didn’t bother him—he often shut down most of his systems and used his back-up processor to ponder the more complicated issues of the day. But the algorithmic part of himself took that night as opportunity to rationalize the Emperor’s summons in light of his history with the now outlawed spirit technology. He had come to no conclusion on the basis of insufficient information.

And so he welcomed the rising sun and the promise of more answers for his starved mind. He brought all of his systems online and rose—his ride would depart across the Slaac Canyon Bridge shortly. He slid his arms through the sleeves of the overcoat and slipped the hat on neatly. Walking outside, Olin decided the temperature was fair, a good balance between the chill of the night and the warmth of the morning rays. He had relished those sorts of mornings several thousand years ago and just a short distance away, in what had been the Basalk Forest.

He remembered little, but what did surface to his memory were impressions of the world—the morning chill, his brother’s laughter, the deep influence of an emerald pool: here he paused. The bitter twist of his stomach. The haunting liquid invading his lungs. The desperate cry for oxygen. The fade to black. Olin shivered mentally, his metallic body incapable of such action. The moment of his death forever lingered in perceptual clarity. And as he had passed the new developments—where once had been the infallible green of the aspen forest, bordered by the eternal blue of the firs beneath the jagged peaks of the Atep mountains—those memories surfaced, triggered automatically by his Sensory Memory program which collated those sense impressions with moment matching memories.

Olin disabled the program temporarily and strode to the boarding station. He stepped in lightly and bid the stewardess a good morning. As he scanned the aisles for his new seat, he passed an elderly man coaching his grandson on the mechanics of bridge-building. “Back in my day, the bridges were built to withstand gravity through structural integrity. No repulsors. Just huge columns and strong foundations. Even back to the ancient days, they were built this way—all very dangerous, you see. Natural forces would sometimes shatter the foundations or sway the columns, collapsing the bridge.”

“Could that happen again?” Olin heard the boy gasp behind him.

“Oh no. Our technologies are foolproof now. Nature has no power here,” the grandfather replied.

Olin set his mind to that statement. It disturbed him. He himself, perhaps, was living proof of the greatest defeat of nature’s greatest power: death. He had died. He had regained life—through no act of his own. And yet his acknowledgment of such had been necessary to free him from his delusions—from his dreams of what life was, to the reality of that life. He still wasn’t sure that everything he saw around him was real, but the evidence pointed to that conclusion. The laws of nature functioned properly, no matter how he tried to bend them as he had in the dreamworld—and that he had been learning on his own—proved to Olin that he existed in a world separate and distinct from his perceptions of that world.

This comforted him as much as the thought of complete human domination over nature frightened him. Yes, he may be the conclusion to the argument, but also the exception to it. He thought back to the powers of the ancients—the society he had existed beside all those thousands of years ago: the village witch doctors and prophets he remembered; the sages of Escollion; the dark lords of Surgaph—all myth, legend now, but a power he remembered distinctly. Where was this force today?

Olin found his seat and eased himself into it. Looking outside the small polished porthole he saw a blackbird alight on the glass canopy of the boarding station. It seemed to gaze right at him. Olin gazed back. There was something about the natural that intrigued him—some connection he felt between himself and the bird. Then it hopped off the edge and flapped upwards and over him. Olin shook his head and relaxed. Only a few more hours and he would have some answers.

^*^

When Dr. Wilcox stooped under his favorite oak tree to escape the heat of the afternoon, a profound thought struck him. He sunk into the shade and pulled a notebook and a pen, an antique he had found quite by accident, from his pocket. The brilliance of the cerulean expanse above him and the emerald grass that softened his seat hit him as extraordinary. He tried to think first, but instead he began writing:

I have assumed that if light and darkness were inherent metaphors constructed by the human mind for existence and non-existence, respectively, and if these were replicated, without any such existing program, in the artificial intelligence, then I should be looking for shades of grey to understand the nature of life—be it natural or mechanical.

Such were my thoughts, but now, now something has changed. Yes. This afternoon of dazzling blues and unsettling greens, spirited oranges and deepening violets has illuminated that which I overlooked: white light is not white. No! The beams of the sun itself are composed of all color, not a single color, selected group, but all! If existence then, is light and non-existence the necessary opposite, the absence of any light, then the key to understanding life itself is color.

Yes, good. Color: the powerful symbol, everyday energy, my tool for determining existence.

Dr. Wilcox looked up from writing and sighed aloud. He closed his eyes in anticipation of his next interview or even the chance to call Olin and run the theory by him. This was certainly to be hailed a breakthrough. So he stood and walked to back to the house, leaving his un-weeded garden for another day. He decided to make a fresh lime drink, his grandfather’s recipe, and picked four suitable limes on the way. He would spend the rest of the afternoon with his notebook, hammering out the implications of his discovery. This was a good day, he decided and entered his house.