Jaguar

No one passes through the non-space between universes without being changed by it. How did I know this?

I wasn't sure. I woke up knowing a lot of things I had never learned, and the enormous, complicated answers to my questions came in waves, connecting one answer to millions more in a chain.

Answers. Atoms. The matter and energy that made up all of existence seemed to quake as my mind passed over them.

 I looked down at my hands, then closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the night. This place - Earth, the woman in my head had called it - was different from Rigel C in ways that would have been too subtle for me to notice before now. Light, gravity, time…if I'd been transported exactly as I was on Rigel C, the laws of physics here would have declared me a foreign object and carried out my immediate removal from existence. Instead, I had made my way to another body I had created here, one linked to my own…no, not linked, knotted. 

Higher dimensions weren't intuitive.

The creeping feeling that I didn’t normally know or care about any of this nagged at me quietly for a moment, before being overwhelmed by a new wave of absorbed knowledge.

I had broken through the barriers of spacetime on my way to…her, the woman in my visions. But unlike the schoolmaster…

Reflexively, I reached out. A trillion trillion trillion atoms revealed themselves to me, responded to my command. Tell me where you've been, I said, tell me who you've been. I could feel my reach growing longer, every atom I touched linking itself to another as it did to me, awaiting my instructions. Every single one of them was a 14 billion year old record, and a lightning bolt from Zeus himself, placed into an infinite quiver over my shoulder.

Power felt like relief, like joy. My people would never go hungry again. I was like them now, I could…

No, I said, as I envisioned the blissfully ignorant alchemists in their floating towers. Not like them. Never like them.

The unexpected stab of something more intense than the thrill of receiving the powers of cosmic creation sank into my brain, having been held there by a thin barrier made of impotent frustration. I turned my gaze inward to translate the emotional baggage I had carried across realities.

I felt the physical, composite thing that made the memory, and the pulses it sent out to compel me towards this one course of action. They were the very atoms that made my memories, my impulses…the sum of all the things I’d ever said, thought, wished, done. All of it together was so small, almost nothing, and being made of those pieces of memory, I had been small, too. But I could now change it in any way I chose: go anywhere, be anyone.

But I knew what I wanted to do, how to make it happen, and what this world would look like when it was done. The things I could do were not as big as the things I needed to do.

Then the vision changed. Then changed again. And again. Every change felt like the sting of an insect, small but growing more painful with every stab. I clutched my head as I pulled back from the window into possible futures. Yes, that’s what those were. Every breath from the tiniest of creatures sent me on another path to an unintended destination. My mind had not yet expanded to the point of accommodating infinite alternate timelines. It would expand to that size…

And that felt like a disaster in the making. I knew that if I opened myself up to see every possible outcome, I'd lose track of the reason I had been brought to Earth in the first place. Even the relatively tiny swathe of potential futures I could see now was overwhelming. It would make me numb.

It was all expanding, expanding, expanding, accelerating, accelerating the rate of acceleration…

There was a future where I lost myself in these powers. Many of them. There were more of those than the outcomes I wanted. I’d have to fight hard to make things the way I wanted them, and to stop the others from coming to be.

I had to save them. I had to save them. Nothing else matters, I told myself.

I strained my mind’s eye to lock in on Rigel C, turning to see the exact reality I left behind. My original universe was where I expected it to be, but the time seemed…displaced. I put it out of mind when the sound of their voices reached me.

I expected to see my people mortified at my sudden disappearance, but the sounds and sights weren’t right. There was distress, but it wasn’t acute. What I saw was just the kind of droll, grinding despair we’d all been living with for years, a moment that was indistinguishable from any of the others before I’d come here.

Then I saw myself, raiding a city foodcrafter’s luxurious stores. I could remember exactly what had gone through my mind as I looked at the bitter vegetables that were piled floor to ceiling, the hatred at seeing something that we desperately needed, but that the alchemists saved to be used as a status symbol on rare occasions. I had wanted to tear the place down.

It had been three years since that day.

This couldn’t have been right, I said to myself. My head pounded as I forced my mind to ascend. Time and space spread out beneath me, and with an effort, I saw the singular pasts and infinite futures of both Rigel and Earth. I gritted my teeth - though I had no teeth here - as I locked in on  the place on Rigel’s timeline where I had jumped off…an event that, from the linked spacetime “present” of Rigel and Earth I now occupied, wouldn’t occur for another three earth years.

The path I had taken outside of the link between universes had thrown me into the past.

******

It didn't add much to my feeling of bewilderment to find I had moved across space and time, and had apparently done the latter in an impossibly wrong direction. It was just too big a thing to wrap my mind around.

Or…no, that wasn’t right. I had entered another space, become aware of it. Having witnessed a fifth dimension, even though all I had done was flail and sink my claws into the boundaries of time, the four dimensions beneath all of that now seemed…flat? Compressed?

I could recall being a man who was desperate, hungry for knowledge, for power, but more and more, that felt like a different version of myself. It was a different version of myself. I hadn't displaced my exotemporal counterpart like the schoolmaster. I had been reborn, built from the dust and energy of Earth beneath me.

Only now did I realize how frigid it was in my little crater. It had been almost lethally cold when I had snapped awake, but the feeling had been only one kind of shock amongst several that had been vying for my attention. Now that I was thinking about it, I shivered violently. I needed to get warm.

Almost instinctively, I pulled what little heat there was from the air around me. I felt marginally warmer, but I soon found myself gasping as all of the air in a three meter radius around me began to condense into liquid. The nearly invisible film evaporated in thin, lazy wisps as it touched the ground.

Fighting the hypoxic panic, I used my inward eye to see what was around me, finding that my reach now extended hundreds of kilometers. Every atom within that radius seemed to turn and salute me, pledging themselves to my command. A myriad more joined them every single second, promising every iota of their chemical energy at my demand. I could have stripped the heat from every gram of air within my grasp, turning the area into a fragile, frozen wasteland, and briefly making myself glow as bright as the sun.

But I forced myself to stop, to accept the cold. Oxygen was more important than warmth. The space around me grew even colder as more air rushed in to fill the void I had created.

Focus. I had to focus. I'd inflict untold destruction with this power without the focus I had not yet mastered. On Rigel C, my crude alchemy had required all the mental exertion I could manage, but now that I had touched whatever was outside spacetime, a mere thought could send gale-force winds rippling out from me. I'd need to be different here.

But to be different, I needed my people. They were the ones that always motivated me to do more and greater things, to learn, to evolve.

It occurred to me that if my body could cross spacetime, perhaps my thoughts could do the same. I looked across the exotemporal thread again, envisioning the time, the place and the person I needed to reach. It felt like imagination, but with the uncanny, unshakeable assurance that what I was seeing was real.

"Melia," I said.

No one replied. I could see and hear Rigel’s present, but my voice didn't carry. I oscillated between panic and despair. This wouldn't work, I'd be alone here forever…

Stop. Focus.

"Melia."

A vision of our camp appeared in my inward eye, looking even more squalid than when I had vanished. All I could hear was anguished screaming, but I couldn’t tell who it was coming from. It seemed to be everywhere.

"Jague!"

My elation at hearing them again was instantly dashed. It sounded like they were dying. 

"Melia! What's happening?" I said, my mind and body immersing themselves in the vision. I couldn’t tell whether I was speaking the words aloud or simply “thinking” them. For a brief moment, I wondered if anyone would hear.

"Jague! How…where…" She interrupted herself, "Nevermind. The hallucinations are spreading."

Even through the terror, she pulled herself together, like she always did. I smiled, inspired by her strength, and thrilled to finally have some of my own to share with her.

"It's OK, it's OK, I can fix it," I said excitedly. I’d finally do some good that would last.

She looked unconvinced. Worse, she looked concerned. I knew the look; it was the one she gave me when I made a plan she thought was too risky.

"How?" She asked, her voice not betraying any specific emotion.

"I can…" I said. I hadn't really planned what to do, I realized. I could do anything, but what should I do?

"I…I can bring you to me. Here. I can give you alchemy," I said shakily.

"Bring me…wait, give…me alchemy?" Her eyebrows raised in shock. My breath shuddered with anticipation as I imagined giving her…no, giving them all the life they deserved.

She shook her head, clearing the temptation she had just felt. My heart sank as I anticipated her next words.

"Too risky. You've tried that before, and it nearly killed me," She replied, groaning in what was either pain or frustration.

"This won't be an experiment this time, Melia. I know I can do it," I replied.

"No, Jague. If you really have that kind of power, you can do something just as helpful and less dangerous."

"This is the best way, Melia. This is the way we can finally let our people live-"

"No, Jague, that’s insane, you can’t-"

"This isn't crazy! This is our salvation, we-"

"You don't even know what you're-"

"I KNOW EVERYTHING!"

She fell silent.

The part of myself that knew she was right was too small to overtake the desperate need I felt to save her. To save all of them. I had to make her see; I had to show her. And I knew how I could do it.

My inward eye looked at the whole of her body and mind. I saw every little piece that formed her, every thought running through her head. Her mind was as I knew it to be: strong enough to hold the terror and hunger at bay, experienced enough to examine her own thoughts and judge what was useful and sane, and disciplined enough to discard everything that didn’t help her.

Except there was more in there. Thoughts that weren't hers. Monstrous thoughts, belonging to a man on Earth who reveled in pure, twisted instinct.

"You too," I whispered in horror, witnessing the battle in her head that she was fighting even now.

"He kills, mutilates…" Melia was more disgusted and broken than I had ever seen her, "He enjoys it."

Melia's counterpart did far worse than murder. The man was addicted to making others suffer, and continually sought out greater, more atrocious highs. Worse, Melia couldn’t push the monster out. She couldn’t help but feel the sick, spasming, psychotic thrill the monster felt. She couldn’t keep out the electric shock of revulsion and addiction felt by the murderous Earth man. 

I memorized the feel of the monster, forced myself to look at the mangled, violated bodies he had left behind in his rampage, and to feel the maelstrom within him. Human thoughts were like an open book to me now. If I ever found him - and I could find a lot of things now - I’d recognize the twisted curvature of his piggish thoughts. I'd kill the monster if the opportunity ever arose. He didn't deserve the gift of existence.

"When you get here, you'll never have him in your head again," I said.

"In my-" A surge of wrath coursed through her mind as she grappled with what I had just done. The audacity, she raged, that I was invading her thoughts, the only thing she ever kept for herself. I was not prepared for the unfiltered venom of her next thought.

“At least when he was only a killer, he couldn’t invade minds like they could.”

The thought in her mind was as clear as if she had screamed it at me. It stung, but I didn’t defend myself from the condemnation. She was right. I’d done exactly what Rigelian alchemists always did. I’d treated her mind like a book that I had every right to read, with no regard for the person whose life was written on those pages. I forced myself to bury the guilt surging up into my chest.

"I'm sorry, Melia. This is how we’ll survive," I said.

"You don't know that! Stop and think, Jague!" Melia yelled.

I looked for her in the higher dimension, and found what I was looking for. Like everyone else, she too possessed exotemporal “matter.” Like mine, hers was unstable, “vibrating” chaotically in that higher dimension, when they should have moved in lockstep with the classical matter. Unanchored to the normal foundations of reality, they could move anywhere across that universe…or across linked universes. Her exotemporal matter was entangled with that of her monstrous counterpart on Earth, and their minds, being made of matter both classic and exotemporal, danced easily across the two universes, blurring the line between the two individuals in a disorienting clamor.

"It'll be over soon, Melia," I said in the most reassuring tone I could muster.

"Not this way," She pleaded.

"There is no other way!"

"I don't want this!"

No more arguing, I said to myself. She could hate me forever if she wanted, but I had to save her now.

I envisioned a giant hand that scooped her up from Rigel C, pulling her to where I was. She screamed in pain, and I tried to radiate as much comfort as I could to her, but my empathy didn't survive the entrance into that weird non-space between universes.

In this non-space, I manifested as a giant: the only point of light in an infinite, all-consuming black.

Her face was pure rage for only a moment, before it turned to sorrow. I had never seen her brokenhearted. In her misty eyes, I could see the damage done by my betrayal. She was being ripped away from her home, and what's worse, it was a friend who was doing the theft.

The emotions fell away, stored for a more opportune time. A look that I’d seen many times before appeared on her face. It was the sign that something heavy she held in her mind was being put away, so that she could become strong enough to face a challenge. She closed her eyes, and began to look for a way out.

"Don't!" I screamed, terrified that she would succeed, like she always did. She didn't so much as look at me. I trembled. There was nothing outside of the space between universes. If she got out there, if she left the safety of the bubble I had formed to pull her through space and time, I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t know what would happen.

She kept climbing, kept pushing outward, having set her mind on ensuring that no one would control her fate, even if it meant her death. It gave her the clarity, the will to look into the void and embrace it.

I had to stop her somehow. I couldn't lose her.

"I'm sorry," I said. She glared in my direction, stopping her escape attempt for a moment.

"You told me you'd never use alchemy on me, Jague," She growled.

"I know. I know. I'm so sorry. I just can't lose you."

She sighed and balled her fists, and her face relaxed into irritated resolve.

"Never again, Jague," She growled, resigning into helpless, impotent rage. I didn’t have to read her mind to know she’d never forgive me for this, but my relief was stronger than my guilt. I could save her now.

"It's OK. When we’re done, I can reach into the exact moment in time where I found you and bring everyone-"

My exotemporal "hand" shook violently as something stung it. Melia “fell,” briefly attempting to get back to her feet, then staying prone when the "ground" beneath her didn't stop moving.

The metaphor in my mind that let me understand and use the exotemporal space was beginning to collapse. Without knowing how, I understood that if I lost the vision of the non-space, I’d lose her.

Pain lanced through a part of myself I had only now discovered, and I couldn’t morph my mind fast enough to “swat” the stinging thing away. Suddenly, my "hand" felt like it was being crushed in a vice full of needles, and the rest of my "body" went numb and cold with what felt like venom.

The vision began to turn to static as the relentless stings accelerated, seeming to stab deeper every time. As the pain ratcheted ever higher, it became difficult to think about anything else.

I screamed. Melia screamed, an ear-splitting sound that betrayed the pain of entering a place where she shouldn't have existed, and being presented for judgment to the beings that controlled that space. My focus broke, and the last I saw of my exotemporal “body,” it was disintegrating, dimming out as the darkness grabbed tiny pieces of it and dragged them into the smothering void.

Melia’s scream vanished into the ringing of my ears.

******

"No, no, no no no," I repeated as I cycled between senses, struggling to push past the horror that kept pulling me back to the classical dimensions. Every time I tried to recreate my “body,” I found I couldn’t conjure the vision.

I had destroyed her. I hadn't seen it happen, hadn’t seen her disappear, but I knew, I knew, I knew…

She was gone. My best friend, my greatest ally, the real leader among the two of us; I had thrown her entirely out of reality itself.

She was gone. She was gone.

Everything in me screamed that it couldn’t be. I knew it was grief, that I had to get a grip on my thoughts right now, or I’d…I would…

Insane thoughts raced through my head. Charge into the exotemporal space and fight the thing that had taken her. Recreate her here, like I had recreated myself. Reach into the past, again and again, as many times as it took until I got it right. Every preceding second in that timeline was another Melia that I could…

She was gone. Every thought ended with that condemnation. She was gone, and it was my fault.

I sank my fingers into my hair, ignoring the smell as the heat from my hands began to melt the strands in their grasp. It was just more miasma, one more miserable weight made of my stupidity, piled high atop countless others just like it.

"You're an idiot, Jague," Melia said, the sound reverberating through the Earth air. My heart jumped.

“Melia!” I said, stammering something even I couldn’t decipher. A tear of joy formed in the corner of my eye.

Though I could hear her all around, she wasn't speaking to me through the connecting strand between universes. She was here on Earth, transformed into a being of wind and dust.

"Melia," I said, my eyes beginning to water, "I thought I'd-"

"Yes, you almost did. God, what were you thinking, Jague?"

My reaction had been emotional, and we both knew it. As usual, she had been the one to look for more sensible options, while I knee-jerked. Even with all of the foresight that was available to me, I had seen one fantastic possibility, and had rushed to make it come to fruition.

"So…what now?" She asked.

"Well," It was becoming easier to think as the air around me slowly grew warmer, "I think we take care of you first."

"I would appreciate being solid again, yes."

"Oh, I don't know. You might be much more powerful in that form."

"No. Solid, Jague."

"Right. Right."

"I'll need to do it in a place where I'm not going to kill too many things when I form. It might actually be best if I materialize out in the ocean."

"What makes you say that?"

"The materials will be more uniform. Any ice from the temperature drop will float upwards, and the conductivity of the water means it'll warm up again faster than the air would."

This kind of conversation was pretty typical. Melia was the tactician; asking me what the plan was was simply a request that I be her sounding board for a moment. She usually left the grand strategizing to me, preferring to handle the details between the start and finish, but with my latest lapse in judgment, I knew she might not be willing to do things the same way we had done them before.

“Is there any way we can block others from crossing the exotemporal thread we used?” Melia’s question caught me off guard, and it took several seconds before I could stammer out an answer.

“Um…bl-block it?” I said. The idea raised the familiar fear of isolation, which felt much worse after the panic I’d faced when I lost Melia in the void.

“We can’t have them coming through like we did, Jague. There’s no guarantee they’ll survive,” She said coolly, perhaps anticipating my reaction.

“But…” 

She was right, I knew she was right, but I couldn’t bring myself to imagine that the others wouldn’t eventually join us here. Melia couldn’t sigh, as she had no lungs, but I could feel the understanding disappointment that usually preceded a negotiation. I took a deep breath to clear my mind as much as I could. If she thought she needed to talk me down, then I needed to consider why she felt that way.

“How did you make the transition, Jague?” She asked.

“Pardon?” I replied.

“When you began to move to Earth, what started it? What pulled you in?”

“I…I don’t…”

“Think, Jague. You can see through space and time; use that.”

I shuddered to think what idiotic things I would try if she wasn't here.

“Wait. You moved through that space, too. Can’t you-” I began.

“Focus, Jague.”

I shut up and did as I was told.

"It…the voice in my head was a young woman. She was running, fleeing, and I…when I…she had to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

Without the unknown woman in my head, the raw emotions had faded somewhat, but I could still feel the withering fear, the betrayal, the brokenhearted anger, the helplessness, all of it churning together in a maelstrom in her heart. I doubted I’d ever completely forget what that felt like.

“When she was the most afraid, that’s…when it started,” I said.

“Stop relying on your feelings, Jague. Look. You can see what happened,” She said.

But Melia was wrong this time. I was looking, it was just that the action and the emotion were tied together. To look was to see, to hear, to feel, taste, smell…I couldn’t simply observe the event from the outside. Not for lack of trying. Memory and sensation were just inexplicably tied. One fed the other, but both dulled the other’s edges.

It was the same for me, as well. Every event from my own life was too tied to how I had felt at the time. Every fact I had failed to see at the time was still hidden to me.

“Yeah. That’s what it was. She got scared, then we started to transition,” I said, telling a lie of ignorance. It wasn’t the first I had ever told her.

“OK then. There are no fewer than ten suffering hallucinations in the camp right now. We can’t risk them getting pulled through; you and I barely survived the transition,” She replied.

“Then we figure out how to do it safely, and pull them out of Rigelian time the moment after I…” I stopped, wanting to give the proper weight to the next word, “Brought you here. We can access any moment in time; we can take as long as we need.”

“You can access any moment in time. Maybe. But are you sure the clock isn’t still running back in our universe?”

It was a good question; one that I couldn’t answer. Could I afford to wait? Would I create…I don’t know, universe-destroying paradoxes if I pulled them out of their time? Some higher part of my mind demanded I know what I could do with this power before I wielded it like a hammer.

But I needed to save them from their lives of squalor and terror, and I needed to do it now. The part of me in the four classical dimensions, still plagued with emotions and impulses, wasn't getting the message from that small part of my mind.

“Don’t, Jague. You don’t know what will happen,” Melia said.

“Who’s reading minds now?” I said angrily.

“I know you. I don’t have to read your mind to know when you’re about to do something rash.”

“I have to do it. We can’t risk losing them; we protect them at-”

“At any cost? Even their own lives?”

“I can do it! I can-”

“You don’t know what will happen! God, have you learned nothing? You’ve only done it twice; once on yourself - on accident - and you nearly killed me the second time.”

She was right. I had almost lost her. I had been reckless and desperate, but what choice did I have? She was losing herself, and like she said, I didn’t know if the clock was still running in our universe, if they too would come unglued from spacetime like I had.

And anyways, she had made it, so they could, too.

“If you do this,” Her voice fell to a tone that was almost a growl, “You’re on your own. I can’t stop you, but I won’t help you with this. I won’t clean up this mess for you.”

I couldn’t believe she was putting me in this position. She had to know the stakes, how helpless the others were without us. They needed what we had. We were gone, and in all the potential futures I could see, that meant that they would soon be dead.

“Might be better that way. Not sure you could help me with this,” I said coldly.

And then, she was gone. The field of oscillating particles disappeared, and the air returned to its normal state of chaos. I sighed, and started to walk away from my impact crater, wind rushing as I unconsciously moved the air in all directions.

I’d have to figure out how to stop doing that. I needed control.