The Elders (Mind Dimensions #4)(47)

“So you just want to have a conversation in Nirvana? Face to face, mind to mind, so to speak?”

“That’s a very good way of describing it. I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“And when you ‘talk’ that way, you can’t lie?”

“Pretty much.”

“Why do I have a feeling that the devil’s in the details?” I consider pulling out of this whole exercise.

He must’ve noticed my hesitation, because he says, “How about this?” He gets up, walks up to the wall, and opens what appears to be a safe. Out of the safe, he pulls out a small revolver and turns to face me. “You can shoot me if something goes awry. You know I wouldn’t take being Inert lightly, as it would cost me many millenniums of exile from the other Elders.”

“Right, but if you made me Inert in Nirvana, I’d end up back in my real-world body next to George’s plane. Not to mention I’ll still have those people in the real world who would shoot me for making you Inert.”

“We already established that if making you Inert were the goal, I could have done it a million times over. As for the people outside, well, I wouldn’t want you to decide to use this gun lightly. Still, I have so much to lose that giving you this gun is not an empty gesture.”

“Fine,” I say and walk over to take the gun. “Let’s get on with it.”

As soon as I aim the gun at Frederick, my senses go away.





Chapter 14





Before I fully register anything, a thought intrudes—a thought I recognize as Mimir’s.

“Darren, don’t trust the Elders with the secret of my existence.” As soon as the words reach me, I sense Mimir’s presence disappearing.

“Wait,” I think back frantically. “Is this what you tried to tell me before? You realize you got cut off at an important point, don’t you? You ended up making me think I wasn’t supposed to trust someone, and it drove me crazy. In any case, why don’t you want them to know about you?”

No reply comes, so after what feels like a few minutes of angry waiting, I turn my attention to Level 2 itself.

You’d think experiencing this sensory deprivation would be easier the third time, but it’s just as frightening now as it was on my two prior visits.

The difference lies in how quickly I become aware of that special sense that lets me ‘see’ neural networks. It’s almost instant this time. I see three networks: two frozen networks that are me and Frederick outside Nirvana, and a dynamic one that’s the Level 2 version of Frederick.

Though I don’t have much experience with these patterns, especially activated ones like his, I can’t help but think that Frederick’s form is unique. His ‘neurons,’ if that’s what they are, don’t remind me of stars—the mistake I made during my first time in this realm. No, the spots of ‘color’ are more ‘orange’ than the whiteness of starlight. The synapses remind me of the sun’s rays trapped in a piece of crystal.

Suddenly, all that colorful stuff surrounds me.

A wave of anxiety hits me, or at least that’s the best way to describe the emotion. It’s not fear so much as a sense of being invaded and having my privacy violated. There’s a hint of shame too. I felt this way during a dream where I was in the middle of Times Square naked, only this is much stronger.

A weird sensation overtakes me. On one hand, I’m definitely incorporeal, but on the other, I feel as though I’m being erased from existence. How can something that’s not physical be erased? I don’t know, but I fight the force that’s trying to erase me with all my will.

And then the strange feeling subsides, and a new one appears that’s just as unpleasant. I feel as if I’m destroying something. As I endure this feeling, I realize that the pattern that is me has the pattern that is Frederick at a standstill.

It’s a little bit like when I encompassed Thomas, Kyle, and my own pattern on my first visit to Level 2; my pattern surrounded the others in order to Read, Guide, and phase out. This time differs in that I’m only halfway surrounding Frederick. It’s also a more dynamic process. I think these two results are related. Frederick is ‘alive’ and clearly fighting my pattern as it’s trying to absorb his, and vice versa. It’s a strange mental tug of war that reminds me of the day I tried to meditate before a tooth extraction, with my adrenaline making it impossible for me to calm my mind.

Then I feel fear, and what makes this fear odd is that I know, without a shadow of doubt, that it’s not mine. Well, it’s mine now, but it didn’t originate within me. A flood of other foreign emotions hits me like a wave. Surfing on this wave is a single thought: “Darren, it’s me, Frederick.”

The thought is different from Mimir’s telepathic voice. I can almost ‘hear’ it.

“Try your best to speak,” another thought says. “You should be able to project your thoughts to me.”

A slew of emotions accompanies this advice, and somehow I know he’s telling the truth.

So I try to talk, ignoring the fact that I don’t have a mouth and that there’s no air in this place to carry sound waves. The message I try to get across is: “So, this is Assimilation?”

“That’s it,” Frederick’s projection responds. “You did it. And indeed it is.”