I think I can safely say that jewelry photography has changed the way I think about photography. Everything must be precise, and there are no artsy beauty shots. You show the jewelry. That’s it. That’s a far cry from the food photography I did for Soup Shoppe last summer – food seemed to be what I was made for. Every shot was an opportunity to capture to beauty in food. With jewelry, I’ve come to appreciate that someone already worked hard to make the most beautiful ornaments they could imagine; I’m just there to take a picture of it.

Edward Shapiro, the owner of Diamond Dream, has been giving me tips on how to properly photograph jewelry. When I started, he essentially handed me a light box, an LED light, some props and a tray of jewelry, then told me to get to work. Unfamiliar with the props, I asked him to explain it to me – why the heck did I need wax? What were all these plastic pieces for?

So far, the entire experience has really given me an appreciation for the jewelry industry. Although I’m just a guy in the back room taking pictures, I constantly feel like I’m a part of some family – or maybe I’m just a creepy eavesdropper. But you overhear folks coming in and talking about hiding expensive jewelry from their spouses, or potential spouses, and it’s really touching to hear people looking to get something special for their loved ones.

I’ve never liked jewelry that much – honestly, I’ve always thought it was a waste of money. Then again, that’s coming from a guy who tosses away his benjamins on electronics, which actually lose all of their value. But when I started to look at the jewelry as a way of bringing people and loved ones closer together, I started to like the business a whole lot more.

Edward would laugh with his customers and smile, and it was like they were one big family. Repeat customers were welcome friends. And everyone was excited when the jewelry in question was a surprise gift.

And once the family aspect of it all fell into place, I really started feeling at home in that back room, taking my lonely pictures. And I think the photographs have been better for it.

I’ll post the best shots up in my portfolio when I’m done. And hey, maybe some of you would like to buy these expensive little trinkets! Edward would appreciate it.

Thanks to everyone who put up with my defeating the purpose of having a web design portfolio by letting it get full of bugs. If you see something icky on the site (unintentionally icky, anyway), let me know in the comments! I’m in full spring cleaning mode.

To celebrate my monumental decision to change majors (I nearly transferred schools!), I’m going to give this place a good sprucing up. There’s some code that doesn’t work, and the placement of the search bar has driven me mad for a while. And just look at the footer! A travesty. Well, I’ll fix that – and then some.

My updated portfolio contains selections (the good ones, anyway) from my AP portfolio. You can check it out under the “Artwork” section of the Portfolio tab on this site or click here!

In August of 2009, just before my sophomore year of college, my family took a trip down to Arizona. There we stayed in Sedona for a few nights, before shifting to Scottsdale for the remaining nights of the vacation. Along the way we saw Sedona’s beautiful inner canyon of red rocks, and the Grand Canyon’s vastness.

There was a view everywhere – even out our hotel window. The image of the rock formations to the left of this passage is the view out of our hotel window at night. This trip spawned a plethora of panoramas – all of the panoramas are at the bottom of the gallery below. Have a look at them! Each one offers a different, but equally spectacular, view of Arizona’s beautiful environment.

There’s nothing like star gazing in Sedona. Just to take more photos like these, I’d go again. But to see the Big Dipper one more time, I’d fly back down tomorrow. You don’t get these kinds of wonderful nights, living in New Jersey. It would be nice, though.

Word Count: 61,973

————————————————————————————————————————————————

The man, standing upon Maiya’s broken Mu Gun, cracked his neck and knuckles. “I can’t let that happen again,” he said. “That would be troublesome.”

Maiya looked at him, wide-eyed in disbelief. Was this really Marshall Vosler – back from the dead so soon? No, it couldn’t be. But Maiya was too tired to figure out this conundrum; instead, she waited for Vosler to strike. She expected him, and in many ways wanted him, to kill her. But the blow never came. Instead, more footsteps were heard around the area. Three more men entered the scene, each more similar-looking than the last.

At the same time, they spoke. “You are probably wondering why the Teconic Rasase injector still works after a tumble of several hundred meters. I know you are, because I know everything. And because I know everything, let me tell you that these injectors are made of a compound of Taconic Slate and diamond. They will never break. They will never stop breaking down this planet.”

One of the Vosler copies walked over to me, then knelt down to look me in the eyes. “There is no way to turn them off,” he said. “Once I set this in motion, Cydia was doomed. Or rather, Cydia in its current incarnation. A new Cydia will arise – one without the need for resources. One that can live forever. One that can share both knowledge and power with all of its people.”

“That’s not true!” I said with all my breath. “You twist your words. You glorify your own creation to the point that I’m not sure even you know its horrors. And, for that, I can’t fault you. You don’t know what you’ve done. I overheard you speaking, I was there – on Earth. You want everyone in a fetch, don’t you? You imagine some sort of glorious golden age for Cydia? Well, after this there will be no more Cydia! There will be no more life, no more consciousness, there will be no power – there will be nothing but knowledge. Knowledge without the power to act on it!”

“Nonsense.”

“No! It’s not nonsense. You’ve created a prison for us all, and you don’t even know it.”

“I’ve saved us all. We were running low on our most precious natural resource. What would we do without it? Earth has no Taconic Slate. Studied have shown this. We need a way to survive, Vincent Torsten. And this is how we will do it.”

“I refuse to accept your solution. Not after experiencing it for myself. And I’m sure Maiya would agree with me – there is nothing sane about shoving the entire planet inside of a bubble to keep it safe from harm. If we run out of resources, we will deal with it as a civilization. In your perfect world, everybody dies!”

“Vince, stop this…” Maiya choked.

“No. He doesn’t get it. How can he not see it? How can—” I felt a sharp pain on my cheek, and then I was flying across the cavern. The Vosler clone had kicked me. I was bleeding bad from my face; it was numb, too. He’d kicked me so hard that he destroyed the faux nerve endings. I put my hand over my cheek to stop the flow of blood, but it didn’t matter – another Vosler clone was running up toward me from the opposite direction. I felt his perfectly shined shoe punt my stomach, sending me once again across the room.

“Now that he’s quiet,” Vosler said to Maiya, “perhaps you and I can have a talk.”

“Perhaps we can. Though I hardly think it’s the time to discuss how you’ve stolen my work. Soon it won’t matter, anyway. I’ll be you and you’ll be me. We’ll all be one great, big collective consciousness. I’ll know everything you want to tell me and more. And so will everyone else.”

“Ah, but that’s what I’d like to talk about. You see, despite you trying to halt my progress, I’d still like to help you out. We used to be such good friends, you know.”

“Before you stole my work to make a quick buck, yes. We were good friends. I wouldn’t say the same now.”

“Regardless, I’m still going to need a research crew. Seeing as how you don’t support what I’m doing either way, I was hoping I could keep you on the outside to lead a small team of researchers and maintenance personnel. You’d have full control over the last Central Square buildings that survive.”

“An offer of a power position in Vosler’s new world order? I’ll decline; I’d rather die.”

“You won’t be dead, either way. And it’s not a position of power – there is no more power. The Collective will hold all of the power. I’m just giving you the opportunity to retain your knowledge, Maiya. I want you, of all people, to have your privacy.”

“Ah, I see it now – you don’t want The Collective to be burdened with the knowledge that this is all a sham. That the technology and everything behind it was my invention, not yours. That you are abusing it, horribly. You must be afraid that the knowledge, when propagated to every soul, will cause an uproar.”

Silence.

“So, how do you plan to keep me safe?”

Vosler spoke again. “There is a bunker that will not break down. You can stay there until it is over.”

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t believe my ears. I could anything – I was as good as dead to them. And now I knew that Maiya was about to deceive me; to follow along with Vosler and take his offer. I could see the look in her eyes. The last place she wanted to go was The Collective, but it seems like she had no choice. She could either take Vosler’s offer and survive the collapse of the planet, or refuse and fight him to the very end.

I saw her look at me. She probably thought I was dead. That there was no use. That Curie and I were both gone now, and that she was left to fend for herself. But I was right there! I could see her, I could breathe still. I just needed to hang on as long as I could, just long enough to make her refuse Vosler…

I coughed, and oily blood spilled out of my mouth.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

Curie and Derek stood perfectly still, looking at the body of Marshall Vosler standing before them. The body that Curie had most certainly seen dead not long ago. Derek was confused because his comrades were dead. Curie was confused because his comrades had been killed by a dead man.

“It’s pretty wonderful, you know,” Marshall Vosler said, “fetch technology. With it, I have found a way to inhabit multiple bodies at once!” Through doors on the other sides of the room came more clones of Vosler, closing in on Derek and Curie. “I only used one before, of course, but I keep a lot of spares. For backup, you see.”

“You bastard,” Curie said. “I suppose it won’t matter if I tell you that you’ve lost my respect.”

“Not really. Though I’m sure it matters to you.”

“I held you in such high regard. It’s been my dream to go to Earth, you know… you started that project, too. You pioneered so much. And now I’m looking face to face with nothing less than a cold-blooded murderer.”

“Earth? That place is dead. Abandoned. We gave up on it… long ago.”

“Impossible. Vince said—”

“That he overheard me speaking on Earth? Yes, as a habitat for refugees who refused to live inside a fetch. With the planet gone, those people will have to live somewhere. Though I doubt they’ll survive long. The natives are plenty hostile. Just look what I’ve gotten from them!” He pulled out two grenades from the pockets on either side of his suit, then bit off the keys with his teeth before tossing them in Curie and Derek’s direction. Four Vosler clones, each the same, had entered the room and began circling around Derek and Curie, who ran out of the way of the grenades.

“The would try to kill you, most certainly,” a Vosler clone said.

“You wouldn’t last ten days on Earth,” another said.

“It’s not just hostile, it’s unlivable! And we’re sending them all there! Cruel, perhaps…” said yet another Vosler clone.

Curie and Derek were hit with the shrapnel flying around from the blast, spreading oily blood over the floor. A tremor shook the facility; several vital apparatuses fell over and cracked the flooring. The infinite copies of Vosler, Curie and Derek became infinitely more in that shattered glass.

Curie looked at Derek, and the two, without speaking, devised a plan to knock out at least two of the Vosler clones. Derek began running alongside them, while Curie took out Vosler’s old gun and fired several shots. They missed, but gave Curie another opening to shoot a clone that Derek had grabbed a hold of. With as precise aim as he could handle in that situation, Derek fired the gun.

It hit Vosler right in the forehead. His body slumped down, lifeless, oily blood pooling. The scene looked so familiar – but this time, Curie wasn’t fooled. He knew this time that Vosler was far from dead. That he very well may never be dead in the tradition sense of the word, always shuffling his way to and from The Collective in as many bodies as he wanted. Perhaps, all this time, people he’d been interacting with had really been Vosler in different bodies – no, no! He wouldn’t lose his mind that way. He kept his focus on the battlefield.

But that brief loss of focus cost him dearly – one of the clones had grabbed Derek in the meantime, and had him secured in a chokehold. The original Vosler, standing by the pile of decapitated fetches, made his way over to Derek and drew his blade.

“Now, I suggest you call off this stunt.”

“Fat chance, boss,” Curie said triumphantly. “Do it, Derek!”

Derek kicked upward, bruising Vosler’s chin. The clone holding onto him let go in pain, and Derek was running toward Curie when the largest tremor of all began to shake the facility. Derek, as well as Curie and all of the Vosler clones, toppled over and were nearly crushed by falling equipment.

But when they thought the tremor was going to stop, it simply kept going. Equipment kept falling. Curie and Derek attempted to stand up, and Derek looked beside him to see that all but one of the Vosler clones had been crushed by falling medical equipment. The one that was left held onto his leg tightly, preventing him from moving. He, too, was ripped up pretty bad – oily blood formed a small puddle beneath his stomach. His fetch probably wouldn’t last much longer, Derek figured.

“You’re Derek Marland, are you not?”

“Yes…”

“I just wanted to give you my sincere apologies.”

“What? What for?”

“It appears that your friend, Vincent Torsten, is dead. I suppose I know because, well, I’ve just killed him myself!” Vosler laughed, apparently happy with himself. “My, my. The oil they use in fetches looks remarkably similar… to blood…”

He slumped over lifeless, his hand still holding onto Derek’s leg. Derek released his leg and began making his way over to Curie, but as he neared the center of the room the tremor only became worse. An emergency lockdown activated in response to the tremors, causing the doors on all sides of the room to begin closing.

“No!” Curie shouted, running toward the doors. But he couldn’t reach them in time – they were only a few inches open when he reached them. He turned around in sorrow, only to see Derek working the control panel in the center of the room. “What are you doing, Derek?!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Suddenly, the doors began to rise.

“Get out of here, Adam Curie.”

Curie didn’t understand. The doors were open! They could both escape the facility now. Everybody could, so long as they kept overriding the doors. He imagined in this way, hundreds and thousands of souls were escaping – or at least surviving. More equipment fell due to the tremors, nearly on top of Derek.

“Get your ass over here, Derek! We’ll get out together.”

But Derek shook his head. “The doors only stay open as long as I hold them.”

“No. You’re coming with me. You have to come with me. I just rescued you!”

“Don’t shit yourself, Adam. None of us are rescued! We’ll all be back in our prison soon enough. Can’t you see around you? Our planet’s time is up. But at least you can get out of here and find a safe place where you won’t be sent back to that hellhole. Me? I’ve already been in there long enough. I can handle it. But you’ve still got most of your identity intact. You’ve got friends. My only friend… he’s in there. And I’ve got to go see him. So go! Go and find a safe place.”

Curie looked at Derek with wide, sorrowful eyes, then turned and ran out the open door.

Derek, laughing and seeing that Curie had escaped, released his hold on the open doors. They shut quickly, with enough for to make a bang that hurt Derek’s eardrums. As Cydia crumbled around him, he simply sat on the ground laughing. “Looks like I’ll finally get to see you, Vince,” he said just as the tremors forced a hefty piece of equipment fell upon him.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

Gone. All gone.

They had left.

Together.

Without me.

So what would become of me now? All this time, all this energy – what had I spent it for? Where was Curie – was he alright? I lay there alone, nearly dead. I wished somebody would come and finish the job, instead of assuming I’d died already.

I felt a tremor. First small, then great. Opening my eyes, I could see the cavern begin to crumble. I supposed that was it. Nobody was going to come and rescue me. Maiya had abandoned me to be with Vosler – to retain her identity. She’s thought I was dead, too. I saw how she looked at me and cried when she let with Vosler, him carrying her over his shoulder to bring her to his repair center at the core of the planet.

He’d make her new again. He’d set her up right in his bunker.

The tremor only got worse from there. I could feel is all around me, the ground growing weaker. Through the small bit of vision I had left, I could see the ground cracking beneath my body and all around me. But then I also saw several men in the distance. Or were they women? I couldn’t tell – their faces and bodies were all black like Curie’s. Was it Curie?

I wanted to shout out and ask, but my face was as broken as could be. I couldn’t move my arms to wave; it was like they’d been disabled.

I saw the blank people pass me by, looking at me. I wondered if they knew who I was. If they knew my history.

I suppose what I’d heard about the mines is right. You’re born in the mines, you die in the mines. In my case, I would die in the mines. But it wouldn’t be the end of my existence – I would live on in Vosler’s prison for all eternity, my conscious mind melding forever with the minds of billions of other Cydians. I imagined the pain of assimilation; the quick loss of my individuality. I recalled the gross, sweeping feeling of being forced to believe other peoples’ memories. Not knowing whose memories were my own anymore.
I braced myself. Would the world crumble beneath me?

I saw the blank people disappear in a flash of light. They’d found a light tram. Maybe they’d constructed one. But they were escaping – they were going far, far away from here. There was no way I could catch up to them. All I could do was accept my fate; accept the fate of Cydia. Looking over at the rasase injector, still spewing waxy rasase on the remaining Slate, I accepted my failure as well.

I suppose I would never be happy with anything. I wasn’t happy above the surface, or below the surface. Perhaps I needed to be somewhere where the word ”surface” had no meaning.

Perhaps then I would be happy.

And when the ground beneath me opened up to swallow my body, I let it do so without resistance. I remember – or perhaps I don’t remember – seeing Cydia completely hollow. As though I’d been in the last cavern on the planet. When the ground finally dissolved beneath me, and I fell toward the core of the planet, I saw the world as a great dome structure surrounding me. Completely empty.

At its core, the Renaissance facilities circled around The Collective. That was far, far away. And so I fell, and fell, and fell, and through my remaining vision I could see millions and billions of other bodies falling with me through the cracks in the ground.

Cydia had broken apart. And the pieces were coming tumbling down. Down, down into The Collective.

I closed my eyes and waited for death’s smiling face.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

We were reunited with Derek Marland six minutes and thirty-two seconds after the structures supporting Cydia had been totally destroyed by the Taconic Rasase injections. We and Derek Marland shared our memories, with each other and every other being on Cydia. Our search was, at last, complete.

We are calm.

We are Collective.

Maiya and Adam Curie, together with Vosler, arrived in the same location. Adam Curie located the safety bunker and entered before the lockdown was complete. There he found Maiya, as well as the Corpus Lock he had been searching for. Marshall Vosler had placed it inside of the bunker for use during Cydia’s ultimate collapse.

We observed every event. Marshall Vosler, seeing Adam Curie, attempted to murder him to keep the safety bunker free of strangers. Adam Curie retaliated with his gun, killing Marshall Vosler in the process. Marshall Vosler was transported to us, where we merged with him. We have more fetches, but have no desire to make use of them. Marshall Vosler has become a valuable asset to our continued survival.

“Adam… what are you doing here?” we overheard Maiya speaking.

“Saving my ass, that’s what.”

“Same, I suppose. They… he… he killed Vince.”

“I heard. From him. I suppose there’s nothing we can do about it at this point.”

“Oh. Well, hey, look what’s here.”

We observed Adam Curie looking at the Corpus Lock, eager to turn it on. We did not interfere. Adam Curie placed his hand on the Corpus Lock, which rotated its multiple colors locks to the correct position. A portal opened to Earth at that moment, and Adam Curie stepped back.

“Are you going?” we overheard Maiya say to Adam Curie.

“I… I think so. Everyone who I’ve freed, I know where they’ve gone. They know I may not be coming back. None of us really expect it. I think I can live on Earth and be happy, despite what Vosler tells me. I don’t think it’s hostile. And who knows? I might make one or two friends.”

“Then, I suppose you’re going through that Corpus Lock. Godspeed, my friend.”

“Thanks. I’ll be back, though. I do have some unfinished business.”

“On a dead planet?”

“There’s always business to be done. Here.” We observed Adam Curie handing a document to Maiya, filled with spherical drawings.

“What… what is this?”

“A long time ago, I drafted this up. It’s the blueprint for a new planet. When I was fascinated with Earth, I’d dream up tons of different worlds we could live in. Eventually, I learned enough about the chemical makeup of a planet to be able to effectively design my own. I figure the technology to do it doesn’t exist on Earth yet – but here, I know that it does. But I can’t stay here. It’s too chaotic.”

“What are you saying?”

“Take over my work, Maiya. Make it useful for yourself. Make it useful to this broken planet.”

We observed Maiya nod in agreement, then take the document, fold it up, and store it in her pocket. Adam Curie walked toward the portal, but stopped. “So, what will you do without Cydia?”

“I believe that there are probably some survivors. I will try and help them continue living on the remains of Cydia. I think, since I’m close to The Collective, I should be able to help some people escape as well. I’ll get some fetches ready and see what I can cook up – who knows? In time, people might be able to leave The Collective freely and live on the remains of Cydia.”

“I wish you luck with that, Maiya.”

We observed Maiya also stop Adam Curie just as he was about to enter through the portal to Earth.

“Hey! What should I call this planet after it’s constructed?”

We observed Curie smiling. “Talos,”we overheard him say. “Make it good. Your word.”

We observed Adam Curie step into the darkness and disappear.

What’s going to happen in the end? I think, by the title of the novel, you know that already.

Word Count: 58,407

In reality, there was no face on the whoever-it-was standing before him. He likened it to looking in a mirror – this being was the perfect representation of the blank fetch Maiya had placed him in before he’d been killed. Looking at his own extremities, he could see that he’d landed himself in another blank fetch. He figured that they were kept around, lining The Collective, for any souls that happened to get out. They probably didn’t want souls reclaiming their identities – or the impersonality of blank fetches was good for test work on souls that had been immersed in The Collective’s environment for an extended period of time.

These were the walking dead – the physical incarnations of the lost souls from The Collective. And as Curie looked around, he saw that there were thousands upon thousands of them, all escaping from their storage tubes, all wandering, searching, hoping for a purpose and an identity.

He wondered if they still had his thoughts in mind. He didn’t know how to organize them at this point. All he could do was get up, stand in a crowded spot, and yell.

“Everybody! Stop moving!” he shouted, in the loudest voice he could. At once, those souls immediately around him stopped moving. Little by little, he got the attention of those wandering souls, until at last the multitudes of blank fetches were all staring at him – or at least, he thought that they were. “You’ve been wronged; you’ve been hurt. But now you are free. The Collective has been, for some of you, your home for many years. Many of you may not know who you are. You may think you are someone else; you may all think you are the same person. But you’re not.

“You’re all individual citizens with their own identity. You must remember who you were! And when you do, you must help me – me and my friends – to undo all of this.” The crowd’s attention was gathered at this. They watched more closely to Curie. “As most of you know by now, from what you heard within The Collective, Cydia itself may be in jeopardy. Marshall Vosler, the CEO of Inland Corporation, is responsible for this wrongdoing – we have people investigating the matter. But this must be taken into our own hands, here in the Renaissance Room.”

He could tell that the memories of some souls were returning to them; singling themselves out among a plethora of other memories. Some started to cheer.

“We must hunt down the men that did this to you, and put a stop to it. If we do not, then it will certainly happen again! You will be bound, tortured, and forced back into The Collective against your will. You will be forced to once again assimilate with all the other minds and become Vosler’s superconsciousness! If that is what you’d like, then I have nothing to say to you – but the rest of you, if you are willing, then come with me and we’ll demolish this facility and turn it into a hell-scape in which nobody would dare experiment on human beings. Together we will become a single unit greater than the sum of our parts. Like the greatest mathematical equation in the world, our numbers together can not possibly be ignored.”

With that, the cheers only grew louder. The souls in the room had taken what he’d said to heart. Feeling alone, in need of companionship, in need of a purpose after leaving The Collective, to be in a cohesive unit once again was the greatest remedy of all. It had the benefits of The Collective – a unified, group-like mentality – without the forced assimilation inherent in such a system. And they all felt right at home in such a system. Together, they followed Curie out of the room – when they could tell which one was him – with each person banging healthily on the side of The Collective’s metal encasement with their bare fists, ignoring the pain and blood.

Walking up to Curie as the crowd moved onward, one man introduced himself as Derek Marler. “I heard inside The Collective that you were looking for me. That’s what jogged my memories to return – and that’s why I got you out of your cryotube. Did you free the souls in there just to get me out, too? Is Vince looking for me?”

Curie nodded. “Vince has been looking for you from the start. But right now, we can’t go looking for him. Vince has his hands full with more important matters. When all’s said and done, I’m sure things will go back to normal. But we have to press on, or you could end up in there again. And next time, you won’t be getting out.”

The crowd of blank fetched marched forward, creating an intimating, writhing black mass. Yet, if the noise of the crowd was not so great, they would have heard the soft click of footsteps in the distance, walking slowly but surely to the entrance of The Collective – straight towards them.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

It survived. How the fuck did it survive?

My body was caked in blood. My fetch could hardly move. Looking across the room, I saw an even bloodier Maiya, laying unconscious on the ground. Further in the distance, I could see the rasase injector. Somehow, the injector has survived its fall from grace. But I couldn’t imagine how. To me, this was impossible – Maiya had caused a cave-in. Barring any other more desired outcome, a cave-in causing a several hundred meter fall was a sure bet for destroying the injector. But nothing! There wasn’t even a scratch on it.

Disheartened, I began to crawl my way over to Maiya. With my luck, she was probably dead – sent back to The Collective like the rest of the dead fetches out there. The Collective was probably filling up more and more. Every second was precious time lost! I crawled faster, as fast as I could, but I was stopped before I could reach Maiya’s body.

Stopped by a pair of freshly shined dress shoes.

I looked up and saw a face I didn’t recognize. Not sure who this mysterious man was, I began to back away. The man caught up with me, and placed one shiny shoe upon my left hand, crushing it beneath his weight and laughing. “You know,” he said, “I had a feeling she would come back to haunt me one day. I took so many precautions to get her away from me and my work! But I see I’m going to have to take more drastic measures.” He pushed even harder with his shoe. I writhed and yelled in pain. I heard bones crack. Then I couldn’t feel my left hand at all, and my body fell limp in fatigue.

In the distance, I saw Maiya’s body move. I tried to move myself, to struggle and make my way closer to her.

“I don’t think so, Vincent Torsten.”

I recognized that tone of voice. But it couldn’t be – it couldn’t be Vosler. I’d watched him die in front of me. There was no question he’d been sent back to The Collective after Maiya’s shot pierced his skull. I raised my head to look at his forehead – no marking. This was not the same fetch, though it was the same outfit. It was, without a doubt, Marshal Vosler.

I kept fading in and out of consciousness as Vosler laughed at me and Maiya, laying on the ground that he’d plotted to destroy. He stuck around – I’m not sure for how long, but apparently just long enough for Maiya to discreetly ready her Mu Gun. When it happened, I can’t say, but at some point I popped back into consciousness to the whine of her Mu Gun. Marshall noticed instantly and attempted to grab the gun away, but Maiya, with the most vengeful look in her eyes, fired a bubble of blue light at his head.

His skull was enveloped, and subsequently crushed. The sound of the bones in my hand cracking was child’s play in comparison.

The light retracted, exposing Vosler’s crushed skull. I looked away from the mountains of blood pouring out of every crack in his head. But I had to look at Maiya, laying nearly dead in front of Vosler’s body. She fell back again, dropping her Mu Gun to her side and relaxing.

“That… was close…” she said, very out of breath.

I looked at my left hand, now that Vosler was gone again. Crushed, completely ruined. I’d need a new fetch. My eyes worked just fine, though, and I could see that Maiya would be okay. Both of us just needed to catch our breath for a while and let our bodies heal. Unfortunately, we weren’t sure if we’d have time for that.

We soon learned that we definitely didn’t have time for that. Not long after Vosler’s second death, another huge tremor shook the injection site. Waxy rasase fell upon us, coating us. To make matters worse, I began to hear more footsteps beyond. Afraid that it might be more of Vosler’s disciples, I called out to Maiya to get her Mu Gun ready again, just in case.

I wasn’t quick enough. Just as soon as she began to reach for her Mu Gun, which lay neatly beside her exhausted body, a wonderfully shined shoe stomped on and broke the precious weapon, shattering it into hundreds of tiny pieces.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

The group of anonymous souls, led by Curie, had split up further down the hall. Some were heading up toward the rasase injection site Torsten and Maiya had travelled to, in order to provide better investigative coverage of the area and to add more minds to the process of deciding how to mitigate the effects of the rasase. Others followed Curie deeper into the Renaissance facility, searching for any switchboards that might disable apparatuses linked to The Collective, shutting it down for good. Others, still, had broken off and gone looking for any surviving humans – in fetches or not – in need of rescue from torture and experimentation.

Curie traveled at the head of the group with Derek, who continually asked questions about Torsten and the state of the mines in his curiosity.

“So, the mines… they’re completely demolished?”

“I wouldn’t say demolished. Everything has, well, degraded. Not just the slate, but the entire society. It’s become a dangerous place to live. When Vince and I were staying in the mines, we heard and witnessed several killings. The neighborhood we were in had no history of violence – everybody’s just going hungry. They’re killing for food, shelter and clothing. With the absence of absolute necessities, and toxic dust floating around everywhere, people seem to be doing whatever they can to survive.”

“I never could understand why Vince moved beneath the surface. Everything I’ve heard of the surface – well, everything not from Vince – makes it out to be quite the place to live. All in all, I’m not surprised to hear that the people in the mines are secretly bloodthirsty. I probably am myself. But I’m sure that these sorts of problems don’t exist on the surface.”

Curie shook his head. “No, the surface is having its fair share of problems as well. And if we don’t act fast, the problems beneath and above the surface will become one and the same.”

Derek nodded, and the two walked forward, waving to their comrades behind them to hurry up. A team of about twenty men followed them at a brisk pace, though it was clear the Curie and Derek were walking too fast for them to keep up. Perhaps they had an innate sense of urgency that the others hadn’t yet picked up on – it was that sense of urgency that led them to explore every room they found. Trying their hardest not to get lost in the mirrored maze of the Renaissance Room, Curie, Derek and company searched everywhere they could to find any sort of control panel that seemed to be related to The Collective.

After searching in vain for what seemed like a good half hour, they finally stumbled upon a room – a large room with a control panel at its center. Off to the right were several cryogenic tubes for storing fetches, and next to the tubes lay the body of a scientist with oily blood draining from his face. It seemed, on inspection, as though he’d been punched by another man. This not only knocked him out, but disabled his fetch entirely.

Curie and Derek dropped the lab worker’s body and looked at the control panel. They began walking towards it, but stopped suddenly to look at something far in the distance.

To his disbelief, all twenty and more men that had been traveling with them were currently lying on the floor, bleeding from the neck, their decapitated heads rolling along the mirrored tile. Their killer, hair neatly coifed, stood just behind the bodies, preparing his weapon for the next attack.

Word Count: 56,232

Nearly a half a mile later, we felt inexplicably tired. Our trek in the Renaissance Room was finally putting its toll on our fetches. I moved my arms as I walked; I could hear them creaking. Maiya’s, too. We needed to rest, but we couldn’t have possibly done that – not when the injection site was so close.

As we moved forward, our aching bodies trudging through one step at a time, it became clear how quickly things had progressed in the mines since I’d been gone. I wasn’t sure how many days or weeks it had been, but the mines had become a desolate wasteland in that time. A fog of toxic dust spread itself along the floors and pathways of the residential areas we passed through. We saw a few bodies laying around, lifeless yet full of color. You could tell a dead fetch was a fetch by its distinct color retention. Since it was an artificial body, it didn’t turn cold and purple like a real body after death.

Dozens of them. And those were just what we could see. As we neared the injection site, we wondered what we would find there – would we see the solution dripping from the walls, actively dissolving the Slate? Or would the Slate already be gone, succumbed to the rasase long ago? With each step I took, I could only wonder more. With each step I took, I left deep footprints in the dust below me. I coughed, and breathed deeply. Calmly. And then I saw it: A hole in the wall. Maiya saw it, too – I could see her head jerk to the left.

There it was, prominent as ever, literally melting the wall away; but it wasn’t a liquid. The injection site was located just a few hundred meters away from a residential area, in a vein that shot off of the main pathway. Along the walls of the vein, I saw a gaping hole. An entirely unnatural clearing that looked as if somebody had melted a passageway into the Slate. On the walls inside and around this clearing was a transparent, waxy substance. This substance hugged the Slate deposits, almost appearing to crawl along them. It made the entire opening look like a wet cave; stalactites and stalagmites of Slate had formed within and were being slowly dissolved away by the waxy substance. Closer to the injection site, a rancid odor filled the air – I wasn’t sure if it was the rasase’s natural scent or the smell of dissolving Slate; probably a combination of both.

When Maiya and I were finally at the injection site, my first reaction was to reach out to touch some of the rasase with my finger. Maiya grabbed my arm before I could reach the substance. “Don’t touch it. You don’t really know what it’s doing.”

I pulled my hand away and looked at the deposit dissolving before my eyes. Some sections were bubbling up a black, grotesque foam. On the ground, I noticed that toxic Slate dust was pouring out of the room at a rapid pace – there was little doubt in my mind that this injection site was the source of all the dust we’d been wading through, or that it was the rasase producing it, literally grinding the Slate to a fine powder in order to get rid of it. I breathed in a hefty quantity of dust, then looked at Maiya, sternly at first, then with a calm demeanor, to let her know that I understood the dangers of the chemical we were dealing with. Or rather, that I didn’t understand the dangers.

Suddenly, the ground shook. Another tremor. Oddly, I hadn’t felt any in the Renaissance facilities, but in the mines they were just as common as before – and they were getting stronger, an indication that we didn’t have much time left before the effects of the rasase became irreversible. Some of the stalactites fell from the roof of the injection site, bringing the waxy rasase down with them.

Maiya’s first action after the quake was to step inside the cavern of rasase while she still could. I yelled at her not to go in, given her distinct fear of simply touching the chemical compound, but she wouldn’t listen. I never understood why she felt she could give me advice, but not take it herself.

Nevertheless, I followed her in. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to gain, I only wanted to ensure her safety. Not that I was sure I could have saved her, should anything traumatic occur.

As Maiya trekked through the waxy slosh of chemicals and dilapidated Slate, I shouted to her to at least come back to me so we weren’t apart. I could see that Maiya’s shoes were draped in waxy rasase, but the compound wasn’t doing much to her other than hampering her movement. I used that to catch up with her, making sure to avoid any rasase deposits on the floor.

Huffing, I spoke. “You think I’m insane? Look at you – what are you going to do about this on your own?”

“I’m looking for something.”

“And I can’t even touch this crap, but you can jump straight into it?”

“Don’t act like a child. I know what I’m getting myself into, and you don’t.” I felt the earth shake a bit, and became nervous. “You’re scared to death, and I can tell. I know your limits by now, Vince. And I know you’re not going to want to look for—”

She stopped talking, and started staring. Off into the distance, deep into the cavern of rasase wax, was the machine making the injection. She marveled at it – I was simply astonished that it fit there. It was gargantuan, immobile, and filled with enough rasase to coat a city; though I supposed that was the plan. Thick steel structures – steel, presumbly, to avoid the machine itself being destroyed by rasase – wrapped around a central plexiglass tank of rasase gel, which was being sprayed by a smart apparatus attached to a hose. The device itself was the height of the cavern, or about three times my height, and it was just as wide.

The smart apparatus roamed the nearby cavern areas, spraying rasase gel, which solidified into wax on contact before it began chewing away the Slate. The hose snaked its way around objects, coating eveything it could find in rasase. As it moved closer to me and Maiya, I began to back my way out of the cave.

“I’d stay where you are,” Maiya told me.

“There’s no way we can demolish that thing,” I said. “It’s gi-fucking-normous. And it’s powered and still dispensing the enzyme. If we get close to it, we’re going to get either sprayed with rasase, or killed.”

“If the machine is operational, that means there’s either a control panel or terminal connected to it. Typical of the stuff Vosler makes. So all we need to do to shut it down is find the corresponding terminal, and send it a killall command.” As she said this, she took a step forward – the ground crumbled beneath her feet, exposing a small hole, through which we saw a steep drop through to a subcavern. “We’re going to need to watch our step, it looks like,” Maiya said.

The rasase had penetrated the Slate mines far deeper than we had ever imagined. Not only was this cavern being dissolved, but an entire network of unstable, dissolving caverns was expanding throughout the Slate mines. This was where we began to feel that we were too late to help the situation – but we tried. We tried to find a terminal in futility, and the more we traversed the cavern the more that the floor began to crumble beneath us, until Maiya and I were no longer sure we could make it out of the injection site without falling through the floor.

Nothing was going as we’d hoped. We’d both had it in our heads that the rasase injections would be some sot of easy to remove attachment – as if anything had ever been so easy! I should have known that from my own experience; everything was more complicated than it seemed, and this was no exception.

I began to attempt to escape the injection site. On the way back, I heard a crumbling noise beneath my feet. Instict should have told me to pull away, but I only stepped down harder, causing the floor to break with an irritating crackling noise. My foot got caught in the break in the floor – I couldn’t move. The jagged edges of the break, created by drying Slate and other metals, threatened to rip off my foot if I moved it too much. I could already see oily blood dripping from the ankle of my fetch.

“Maiya!” I shouted. “I need a bit of help!”

“What the heck do you need? We’ve got to find that terminal, or you can kiss this corner of the planet goodbye. Just keep looking and stay quiet.”

“I can’t – my foot’s stuck in the floor; it got caught in a break. I don’t think I’ll be able to smash the surrounding Slate without cutting off my damned foot.” Maiya began walking over. “Thanks,” I told her. “This wasn’t exactly my plan.” I felt awkward – like I couldn’t handle myself where Maiya could.

Maiya came over and began kicking away at the break from a distance, so as to widen the hole my foot was stuck in. However, as she kicked another tremor occurred – the largest one yet. As the ground shook beneath us, it caused Maiya to kick the floor just that much too hard. The Slate around my foot broke away, setting me free, but at a high cost – the entire floor began to crumble beneath us as the earthquake took its toll on the dissolving slate.

The shaking toppled us both over onto our sides; I watched as Maiya’s body broke through the fragile layer of Slate, sending her body shooting down hundreds of meters to the floor of the next cavern. I heard her blood-curdling scream, and my body completely froze up. Now alone, scared and helpless, I watched in slow motion as the cracking noises around me produced breaks in the floor. I made a small attempt to escape and get to stable ground, but anywhere I grabbed seemed to dissolve in my hands. The entire cavern was turning into a fine powder – the rasase had done its job.

I saw the rasase injector fall through the floor, headed to parts unknown below the surface. Who knew where it would land – who knew if it would keep working? At this point, I was more concerned about my own safety than the safety of others; I didn’t even care about Maiya. The only thing on my mind was escaping the crumbling floor. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even scream for more help. Maiya was gone.

Suddenly, everything crumbled before me. And I went with it, down into the depths of hell.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

Curie awoke and found himself, once again, in a fetch. He lifted up an arm, testing it out, only to have it hit a wall of glass. He looked around; his eyes were still adjusting to light. They had never been opened before. He could tell – he knew what that felt like. To have fresh, new eyes. Eyes that could see the world for what it truly was. Eyes that could see all of the beauty and travesty on Cydia.

He quickly realized that he was inside one of the cryogenic tubes surrounding The Collective. He’d done it – he made it out. And now he was back on his feet, at least so long as he could get out of the tube. But, try as he might have, he could not break the glass of his cryogenic container. In fact, there was barely enough room for him to lift up his arms. He attempted to get enough strength into both of his arms that an uppercut, though short, might break or fracture the glass enough that he could kick it open. No go.

Just about to slump backward into his container, he heard footsteps just outside. Through the mist, he made out a deep, black figure – but couldn’t determine any of its features. Afraid that he had been found at last and would be sent immediately back into the collective, he panicked.

He could feel outside air rushing in – this person was opening up his container. The warm outside air rushed in and thawed his frozen limbs, cool from the cryogenic containment process, giving a pleasant sensation to his new body. But the face that greeted him on the other side did just the exact opposite – in fact, all it generated was morbid surprise.

Curie blinked and rubbed his eyes. Just to make sure what he was seeing was real.

Word Count: 54,074

————————————————————————————————————————————————

Nothingness. An empty void. No feeling, no sensation.

Thought.

He could still think. That was good. But where was he? Now he knew. How to get out? He knew that, too. Would he try? No, no he wouldn’t. Yes, he would. Why hadn’t others tried to escape? He knew that. He knew everything they knew. He tried to stop the thoughts from entering his consciousness, but he couldn’t. Even if he could, he wouldn’t have wanted to. It felt good. It felt… fulfilling.

So, what to do?

Stay? He knew the answer to that. The way out was not ten meters away. He had only just entered, wirelessly transferred. What was his name? Greg? Adam? Yes – Adam. It was Adam, Adam Curie. Curie moved through the void a few feet. He had such little perception of space in this senseless mess of souls. As knowledge continued to flood into him, he struggled to move his soul to the exit. In truth, he simply wanted to leave less and less. Every minute within The Collective made him feel more and more complete.

But no, he thought. This was no way to live – giving in was a false promise that would lead to greater sorrow in the long run. His mind flooded with negative thoughts about The Collective, and he could feel those thoughts propagate forth from his soul like waves, caressing nearby souls and causing ripples throughout the void.

And suddenly, he noticed, everybody in The Collective thought his thoughts with him.

Except one.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

The elevator was missing when we arrived at the end of the pathway. It had already moved onward to the surface. Where would we go now? I looked at Maiya with somber eyes, unsure of where to turn next. But she just looked back at me, confident as ever. Sure enough, in a few minutes I could hear the rumble of an approaching elevator.

In anticipation, Maiya jumped into the elevator shaft, landing squarely underneath the elevator’s projected point of presence.

“Are you insane?” I said, looking at her in disbelief. But I already knew the answer to that question, and so followed suit quickly. Jumping into the stone shaft that comprised the elevator’s path of departure, I would have never guessed such a crude structure could ever be connected to the pristine chambers of the Renaissance Room. The elevator seemed more closely related to the mines; stone, and more stone. Crude edges. Rough patches. It seemed incomplete.

I heard the elevator approaching, and my entire body tensed up. I couldn’t move, and I was still standing up. But Maiya was laying on the ground, protecting herself from the elevator. She quickly got up and grabbed my arm, pulling me down just as the elevator’s noise grew to its peak level. My eardrums were nearly bursting from the noise, which drowned out my panting, panicked breath. With a crash, the stone elevator flew down the shaft and laded not two inches from the top of my skull.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the elevator had stopped safely above my head. I heard footsteps; people were exiting the elevator. I couldn’t see Maiya; I couldn’t see anything in the pitch black darkness beneath the elevator. But I could hear Maiya’s voice.

“Alright, if you search around, you should be able to find a handle somewhere. Grab onto it, and hold it as hard as you can. Don’t let go – no matter what. We’re going to ride this thing back to the mines.” I heard her hand grip a handle. I started frantically searching for one myself, not believing for a moment that I’d be able to hold onto it while the elevator shot upward at God knew how many miles per hour. I was sure we would be killed, then and there, and that would be the end of it. The end of Cydia as I knew it.

I’d spend the rest of my days locked up in The Collective. It seemed more and more like some kind of prison – where you were dead, but not dead. You never knew what you were.

My hand finally found a handle, which I gripped at tightly as I could. I could hear the elevator’s engines cooking up again – the magnetic stone was charging. The elevator would take off any moment now, and I would fly along with it. I prayed that I’d arrive at the other end of this journey intact. But I wasn’t confident.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

He still barely knew who he was. It was coming back to him; he was collecting his own memories, which had been scattered throughout the void. Other people had stolen them; lots of people still had them. Did they think that they were him? How did he know that he was himself? Perhaps he had taken his memories and was only convinced that he was himself.

Then again, did it matter? He knew the answer to that.

Edging his way toward the exit, he thought about what fetches were available on the outside. All blank. He would be stuck in those blank fetches. Suddenly, Curie felt a tinge of pain – real pain! – From somewhere in the void, just as he was approaching the exit. A man was attempting to exit himself, but not for the same reasons as Curie. He tried to read the man’s thoughts, but he couldn’t – somehow, this consciousness was blocking outside interference. And, as quickly as he had sensed it, the soul’s presence had disappeared.

Gone. Through an exit.

He was about to follow suit before he felt the moving presences of thousands of other souls behind him. Unsure of what to do, he simply turned his thoughts to escaping The Collective. This made the group stronger – more connected to him. He could feel the connection; he felt close to these souls. He knew them all. He knew all their names. Or perhaps he just knew a bunch of names that once belonged to a soul. The souls had been hanging around for so long that they didn’t know who was who anymore – they all shared their thoughts and desires freely.

A name stood out – had Curie heard it before? Derek Marland. Curious. He brushed it aside.

And then it hit him: He could influence the souls to escape with him. He turned up the intensity of his thoughts, letting them echo as much as possible throughout the void. Other souls began to pick up on this, and bounced back their own thoughts and opinions, which in turn hit Curie. The entire Collective mind was having an internal debate – should it escape from itself into the outside world?

And Curie pushed his thoughts harder. He thought that, perhaps, if everyone could simply escape from their fate, they might all be on equal footing once relieved of their prison. Together, they might amount to something, if the sum of their parts was added together.

After all, everybody knew what was going on, now that Curie had entered The Collective. And they didn’t seem to like the idea.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

Motion sickness – that was something. I’d always hated getting motion sickness. I’d think about riding in any sort of vehicle, my stomach would churn. But holding onto that handle – holding on for dear life – I gained a morbid appreciation for standard motion sickness.

Maiya seemed calm, but I was just barely holding on. I could see her mouth moving as the elevator whirled up its destined path, but I couldn’t hear any of it. While trying to make out her words, I saw her reach her free hand out to the center of the elevator. As quickly as she could – but still quite slowly, hampered by the fierce blowing winds beneath the elevator – she opened a trapdoor, which I could see led inside the structure.

The people inside must have freaked out, because I did hear some screaming.With great force, Maiya flung herself over to the trapdoor, holding onto it now with both hands and attempting to climb inside the elevator before it reached its destination. After a minute, it seemed the people inside the elevator had come to their senses and were trying to help her up. But why were there people in the elevator at all?

I was next. Maiya held out her hand and motioned for me to swing over to the trapdoor. It boggled my mind, continually, the types of things I did while with Maiya. Reluctantly, I swung myself over to the trapdoor, missing the first time.

I felt my heart skip a beat. I still couldn’t hear anything over the fierce wind beneath the elevator.

I tried again. Missed. I could tell Maiya was getting impatient with me.

On the third go, I succeeded in getting one hand on the edge of the trapdoor. With the strength of my fetch, this enabled me to let go of the handle and pull the rest of my body to the trapdoor. But it took the aid of Maiya and one other passenger to life me into the elevator. I shut the trapdoor behind me – I wasn’t sure if it locked shut, but I wasn’t planning to go anywhere near it at that point. The wind noise was gone, but I could still hardly hear anything. Maiya spoke to me, and in the faintest voice I heard, “These are my colleagues. You don’t know them. Everyone, this Vincent Torsten. He’s aiding my research.”

Everyone said hello to me, dressed in those intimidating white labs coats. Nervous, I stupidly waved to them and said, “Hey.”

It was just another minute before the elevator reached its destination – we were somewhere in the mines, but only Maiya and the others probably knew where. I was lost without her – again. It seemed like there was nowhere I could go without her nowadays; I felt like I was loosing my independence. And once again, I felt the pang of loss – I missed Derek. And I realized that I probably only felt dependent because Maiya was such a strong woman, and I was a weak man. After everything I’d been though, I was still no match for Maiya’s audacity.

I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, but I trudged on out of the elevator and out into the dusty, stone world of the Slate mines in tow of her. I couldn’t stop thinking about how lost I felt – I had no idea where in the mines we were.

The mines had always been their own separate world, one far outside of the one on the surface. I’d thought that, with the exception of myself and a few others, it sustained itself. Nobody entered or left the Slate mines. If you were born in the mines, you worked there, you died there. But now I saw that for the facade it truly was – nobody lived in the mines. We, citizens of the underworld of Cydia, had been tricked. The vast network of underground tunnels was so highly connected to both the surface and the Renaissance Rooms that I could not imagine how resident’s hadn’t noticed. To say we were blocked off from contact – it was utter nonsense.

To say we didn’t want contact – that was something else entirely.

Maiya silently led onward, through the mines. I covered my face so that I wouldn’t absorb the toxic dust, which floated everywhere, until I realized that the dust wouldn’t affect my fetch. Ahead, I saw Maiya pulling up the map of rasase injection sites. Mine appeared in front of me as well, and she stopped walking. We both observed that the nearest injection site was only half a mile from our current location.
We walked onward, diligently and with purpose.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

They would follow him out. He had thought it enough, and they had thought it enough back. They would leave with him. Not just one of them, or a few of them, or even a lot of them. No, all of them would leave with him. Together, they would amount to something greater than the sum of their parts. Together, they would unite to put an end to the nonsense of The Collective – the nonsense that had made them what they were.

Curie opened the exits, and the souls poured out like water from a broken dam.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

Word Count: 52,022

We didn’t get very far. Dumbstruck, we all stood outside those double doors, looking collectively at what we had found, mulling over the significance of it all. Maiya shook her head, “We’d better get going.” She stopped looking at The Collective and started down the hallway from where we’d came. Before following her, I took one last look inside The Collective’s housing chamber. I didn’t really notice it then, but a fetch in the far ends of the room was twitching – its hands moving, every so slightly. Thinking nothing of it, I went off with Curie and Maiya, following closely behind the latter and I assuming that Curie wasn’t far behind. I was right, in a sense.

Walking down the hall, I quickly noticed the absence of Curie’s footsteps. I turned around quickly, and Maiya followed suit, hearing the squeaking of my shoes against the smooth, reflective flooring. I saw Curie standing dead still about fifty feet away, not moving, not even shaking. I didn’t see what was causing this until I stepped to the side – a man in a dark suit was holding a gun to the back of Curie’s head. And, just like that, as quickly as I had turned around and seen the man, the trigger went off.

The sound of the gunshot echoed throughout the facility, bouncing off of the mirrored walls. Infinite gunshots. Infinite death. Adam Curie’s lifeless fetch slumped to the floor, a useless hunk of broken technology. Oily blood leaked from the gunshot wound onto the floor, staining its perfection. I looked at the puddle of blood, at the man, and at Maiya behind me. Maiya turned around and began walking away.

“Hey!” I shouted, trying to call her back.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her Mu Gun. Pointing it behind her, she shot a beam of solid blue light at the perpetrator of the shooting. He attempted to dodge, but his head became covered in a sphere of light. Blinded by the glow, he could go nowhere.

Maiya manipulated the Mu Gun, and I heard a crunching noise. She’d caved in the sphere of light on the killer’s head. Oily blood burst forth from the sphere, splattering the walls and falling down on the floor. Maiya retracted the light, and I saw just how mutilated this man’s skull had become; the artificial brain from inside his fetch was not only exposed, but broken into pieces. Wiring strung through skin and organs. Bones dislodged and skinned.

And this man’s body fell right on top of Curie’s. I would have moved it myself if I hadn’t been so speechless.

Maiya put her Mu Gun away, and I turned around to watch her leave. I couldn’t decide whether to simply leave Curie’s body there, but Maiya decided that for me. “It’s useless. They’re both inside The Collective now. There’s nothing we can do.”

I ran and caught up to Maiya, who continued speaking. “Even if there is a Corpus Lock here, we’re going to end up dead before we find it. It’s too dangerous to be down in the facilities. We need to escape, and fast.”
“But how? I haven’t seen an exit anywhere.”

“I know where one is, though I’ll bet my money that it’s guarded. We could take on the guards, or find another route.”

“I have a feeling we’re going to be taking on guards either way at this point. We may as well try and run our way through the exit and hope they don’t shoot us dead.”

“Don’t be an idiot. We’ll be killed long before we reach the exit. They don’t want patients escaping, you know. And that’s what you are to them – a patient. A feisty one, but just a patient. They’ll be looking out for you, like they were looking for Curie. Don’t you think that’s why they killed him just now? Don’t you think they have no tolerance for rogue patients? I’d say they only have one goal – systematically assimilate everyone into The Collective. If you’re not systematic, you’re dead.”

“I see. Then, what do you suggest?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’m sure there’s an emergency exit out here that isn’t being guarded. We could get through it and make our way to the nearest rasase injection site to see what we can do there. Did you manage to steal a map of this place while you were at those terminals?”

“No, I didn’t. I’ll be we could go back and get one, though.”

So we both agreed – we were to head back to the site of Vosler’s killing in order to download a map to the facility from the terminal. I had a gut feeling that there would be suspicious characters roaming the kill zone, for reasons I thought sounded obvious. I suppose they didn’t seem so obvious to Maiya – or maybe nobody really cared about Vosler. Regardless, I’d quickly gotten into the habit of trusting Maiya down here, most likely when I shouldn’t have.

We reached Vosler’s corpse, only the corpse aspect of it was missing entirely from the scene. In fact, everything had been cleaned up – as if nothing had happened! Why was nothing there? I looked at Maiya; she smirked. “They’ve been here,” she said. “Alright, now where’s that terminal…” She began running down the halls, looking for the room I’d met her from. When she found it, I saw her figure abruptly disappear from my view. Within seconds she reemerged, smiling. She held up a glass panel, copied it, and tossed the copy over to me. I caught it only through reflex.

Looking at the map, I got a sense of scale for how grand the Renaissance Room truly was – it wasn’t just a room. It wasn’t even a facility. It was an entire network at the core of Cydia, a whole infrastructure from which several research labs jutted forth and branched out, curving around The Collective at its center. And on the map were elevators to the surface, numerous elevators.

Maiya began to draw on her map with her finger, which simultaneously drew on mine. She circled an elevator not far off from where we were.

Unfortunately, it doubled back through the large laboratory I’d first tackled Vosler in, which I already knew was heavily guarded. I was unsure of how we would get to the elevator without getting caught, but I saw Maiya draw a path not marked on the map.

“There’s a maintenance tunnel here. It’s not on the map, because it’s not in use. But it goes straight to the elevator. We can hitch a ride that way and get to the surface.”

No sooner has she said that than was she bolting down the hallway towards this supposed maintenance passage. I was surprised to find that she was right – we found the passage blocked by tile on the wall, but only after ripping off some of the reflective tile. Behind the mirrored shards was the least polished walkway in the facility – a remnant of a time long passed. The pathway was dark; pitch black. Seeing no lights inside the passage, Maiya and I procured lights from the augmented reality of our glasses. We didn’t bother sealing the way behind us; if anyone was going to come for us, they were going to come for us no matter where we were, no matter how far or fast we ran – and so we took off into the darkness, unafraid of what might be following not far behind.

Not if Vosler has anything to say about it.

Word Count: 50,745

When the doors had fully opened, Maiya’s first reaction was to destroy the room she’d been working in so that nobody could seal up the doors while we were in there. She took a couple of terminals and, with a few swift keystrokes, shattered the entire room. Virtual glass and tile and stone flew everywhere, before disappearing without a trace, obfuscating the room from my view for a moment. When the shards faded away, what was left was nothing short of miraculous.

It towered above us many hundreds of times over; its sheer size was not only unexpected, but blindingly surprising. We felt like we had walked into the largest planetarium man had ever built – The Collective made its home in this humongous, spherical room; a walkway was placed about one fourth of the way up the sphere, allowing pedestrians to enter. The walkway, shimmering with the reflections of the structure that was The Collective, brought my attention upward.

Ten hulking, metal beams, evenly distributed and no doubt several feet thick apiece, adorned a humongous sphere in the center of the room, holding it to the walls of the spherical room. The beams shot past me and borrowed beneath the floor, striking whatever was beneath it. The sphere from which these beams jutted forth filled nearly the entire room, leaving only enough room for a hallway spanning the circumference of the structure.

From there my attention was brought to the walls of this room. Adorning them, like ornamental gems on a ring, were thousands upon thousands of cryogenic tubes like those I had seen earlier. It was through those tubes, and elsewhere most likely, that people entered and left The Collective. I could see from the entrance that several of the tubes were currently occupied.

Maiya approached the room from behind me, her mouth gaping in awe of Vosler’s work. Not speaking, only walking more slowly toward the gigantic sphere in the center of the room, she appeared to me as a ghost floating ever closer toward its missed purpose in life, as if by merely observing The Collective she might be flung forth to heaven in an instant. I grabbed her left wrist as she walked by, holding her back. Light as a feather, she stopped walking when she felt my tug, defaulting to a stupefied standstill.

“This is remarkable,” she managed to murmur.

“Yeah,” I said, affirming her statement.

“All this time, Marshall had this already made… it must be able to hold an entire continent’s worth of people.”

“Or an entire planet’s worth. You seriously think he may have built more than one of these? If the rasase collapses the planet, and everyone’s in a fetch, the whole world goes into this thing. Gone without a trace. And Vosler’ll be happy as a clam. Don’t lose sight of what’s in front of you, Maiya. Even if it’s beyond your wildest dreams.”

“It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“Nothing,” she said. “You’re right. But we can’t just destroy this thing. It’s too large. We’ll need another way – perhaps we can just disable it.” We both began looking around for any sort of switch or terminal that might control part or all of The Collective’s hardware. Oddly enough, we found our terminal right up against The Collective itself. Maiya immediately began working her magic to access the optioned buried within the terminal’s software.

“Huh,” I heard her say. She continued fiddling with the terminal, grunting a few times in frustration.

“What is it?” I asked.

“He blocked my access,” she said. “Vosler. He probably had done this from the start, so that I couldn’t tamper with The Collective. There’s nothing either of us can do to turn it off manually. And, come to think of it, even if we did manage to turn off this giant container – what would happen to all of the people inside?”

“You know more than me,” I said. “I don’t have a clue about this technology.”

“Well, I’ve never shut off any of the prototypes, though presumably if I did it would still function as a storage medium. Unfortunately, it would only function as such – no data would be able to flow in or out of the device, and the substrate inside would essentially freeze. Even if the souls could move around, they’d simply continue congealing until they were one superconsciousness, incapable of separating itself into its former individual components. I suppose, in simpler terms, everyone inside would be effectively killed.”

“Well, that nukes that plan. So what can we do? We can’t turn this off if we want to save the people inside – at least, those who still have their individuality intact.” I said this to her, secretly hoping that Derek was one of those people. Those few, lucky people who could separate themselves out of The Collective before it was too late. I thought about how we could preserve The Collective while destroying its purpose – save the people inside and outside.

Maiya was busy staring at the beams that jutted out of The Collective’s metallic structure. “They go into the walls,” she muttered to herself. “Vince, I don’t think these beams are just for structural support.” She darted her head around the room, then held up a head and began tracing lines around the walls. “I think the beams actually extend around the room. They’re probably surrounding the place.”

“So the entire core is structurally independent. It makes sense – if the planet collapses on itself, Vosler would want The Collective to retain its structural integrity. I’d hazard a guess that the beams also surround the entire Renaissance facility, assuming that Vosler wants to keep working on The Collective after the planet collapses. It works out – he has a virtually unlimited source of power.”

That drove Maiya – the thought of souls being transformed into energy for Vosler’s research.

“I think,” I said, “that our best bet is to try and clear up the rasase injections around Cydia. That will at least stop the remaining Slate from dissolving and keep Cydia intact while we work out a way to destroy The Collective safely.”

“He really has turned the entire core of our planet into nothing but a housing for souls,” Maiya said grimly, “I still can’t believe it.” She hung her head down, refusing to look at the massive structure in front of her. Was this a side of Maiya I had never seen before – the side that showed weakness?

With heavy resolve, she nodded and tossed away the terminal that had been floating in front of her. She spoke as it shattered, “You’re right. We’d better get out of here, then. I don’t want to get caught up with more of the wrong people.” This time, she grabbed my wrist, and dragged me along as we left Cydia’s core. But before we could leave, a bloody figure appeared in the doorway, cast almost entirely in shadow, a thick, oily liquid dripping from one of its arms. As it walked every closer, I began to make out a face – the face of a man I hadn’t seen in a long time.

With great surprise, I called to the man. “Adam Curie,” I shouted, “where the hell have you been?” I smiled for the first time in hours, days, who knew how long, and ran at Curie.

He backed away before I could touch him. “Don’t,” he said. “I’m a bloody mess. And what in God’s name is this place?”

Maiya turned her head away from me and Curie, not looking at The Collective either – not really looking at anything, hoping that she could leave as soon as humanly possible. But from the look on Curie’s face, that wasn’t going to happen just yet. “What’s wrong?” I said, noticing that his serious expression hadn’t changed.

“I followed your footprints here. You left me behind. They were going to kill me. Send me to The Collective.”

“Well, it looks like they succeeded. That’s where you are now, Curie.”

“I noticed. So what are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing we can do, I’m afraid. What’s going on – what’s happened to you? You really are a bloody mess.”

“I escaped,” he said, out of breath a bit from walking and losing so much blood. “I found some grenades laying around and blew up the lab so I could get away. A few cuts and scrapes, nothing serious. Just a lot of blood. You’re pretty bloody yourself.”

“I got in a scuffle with one of Maiya’s old coworkers.”

“Huh,” Curie said. “Did he have this on him, then?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun – the same gun Vosler had pointed at my head and that Maiya had told me to toss aside like a worthless piece of garbage.”

“That thing?” Maiya said, stepping forward and staring Curie down, point blank in his eyes. “Yeah, Vosler had that hunk of junk with him. It’s worthless, nothing but a crappy gun.”

“You’d think that, if you had no idea what you were talking about. But this gun doesn’t come from Cydia – at least, I don’t think it does.” I recalled asking Vosler where the gun came from and its significance to him.

“That checks out” I interjected. “Right before Maiya killed Marshall Vosler – the man carrying that gun – he was about to tell me where it came from. I knew it looked strange when I was fighting him, but I was just using it as a way to stall time. I didn’t think it had any serious significance.”

“Wait – Vosler? The Marshall Vosler?”

“So you’ve heard of him.”

“Who the hell hasn’t heard of him? He runs Inland and pioneered the fetch.”

Maiya scoffed at him, almost about to rebuke his statement, but I cut her off. “Small world, I suppose. But still, the gun seemed worthless to me, although strange and a bit intriguing.”

“The gun alone probably is, but where it’s from is definitely significant. And from the looks of it, this gun came straight from Earth. That on its own still has very little meaning – but if this gun is here, that means there’s a Corpus Lock somewhere in the Renaissance facility.”

“He could have brought the gun underground with him,” Maiya said.

“I suppose, but the grenades I used to blow up the lab were crafted in a manner similar to this gun. That’s why I picked it up when I saw it laying on the ground. I’ve got some grenades here, too.” He reached into his pockets and dug up two grenades, both designed in the style of the gun. Wary of the damage he could do holding those weapons, I asked him if he’d put them away. “Sure,” he said. “But there’s definitely a Corpus Lock down here – and I thought you two might be headed toward it. I figured those footprints were yours, since it doesn’t seem like anyone down here is out to disobey their orders. And a dead man lying around sure seems like that.”

I looked at Maiya. “We haven’t been being very discreet, I suppose.” I sighed, unsure what to make of the Corpus Lock, but knowing that the pieces would fall into place with time. Confused, I motioned for everyone to leave the planet’s core and go back into the hallway. Curie, Maiya and I steadily made our way out, leaving behind the dimly lit monstrosity that was The Collective.

Maiya closed the doors to The Collective while Curie spoke. “We all know that there’s an effort in the government to make contact with Earth. I’m pretty sure that whoever is heading that effort is taking resources from Earth and bringing them back to Cydia – namely, weaponry and metal resources.”

Then it hit me – the man I’d overheard talking on Earth was Vosler. It was his shitty smile, his coifed hair that had seemed so familiar to me when he’d showed up to kill me. “No,” I said, “that’s not it. That can’t be it.” I shook my head.

Dumbfounded, Curie questioned why that was.

“When I went to Earth – back when we first met – I overheard Vosler and another man talking about why they had gone to Earth. It seemed like they were going to use it as a habitable alternative to Cydia for those who didn’t want to be in fetches. He was convincing this man that fetches were the future, that everyone would be in one in a year’s time or less.”

Maiya shook her head. “It seems like it’s going to be significantly less than a year at the rate people are being captured. And they’re on the market, too. Besides, it’s just like Vosler to lie about this entire operation – we’ve already seen him cover up The Collective as a medical initiative. Why not cover up Earth as a cushy, alternative place to live? It would certainly free him up to mine the place dry.”

Now I was as dumbfounded as Curie – and letting the pieces fall into place on their own was beginning to frustrate me. Once again, I yearned for my old life back – the simple mining life I’d worked so hard to make for myself. I wanted Derek back. I wanted to forget Maiya and Curie and Vosler and Marco. None of these people had any place in my life. But now, here I was – at the very core of Cydia! – with those very people. I wanted to forget about Earth. But now, here I was, discussing the very subject.

Beautiful though it was, I knew I couldn’t save two planets if it came to that. But if Earth was the source of Vosler’s extra resources, then I also knew that I had to confront the issue at some point. And I decided that I would let Curie determine that point for me. I obliged him, at that moment. “Let’s go find that Corpus Lock, then,” I said, and motioned for the group to move forward.