know I was going to the mountains?’
He gave me a flat look.
‘You were always going to go to the mountains, Ima. Nothing could have stopped you.’
He settled down in his seat and took three long breaths.
‘Won’t be long now,’ he said.
I walked to his seat.
‘Aren’t you scared?’
‘Why would I be scared?’
‘You don’t know where you’re going. You don’t know what it’s going to be like, or how it will feel. And Caige will be there in some form.’
The stone began to rumble once more. Benedikt smiled.
‘You’re wrong. I know exactly where I’m going, and Caige won’t be there. None of them will be.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They have not transcended, and neither will I.’
‘What do you mean?’
He smiled and turned to you.
‘Reed is quite right. The erta were just a sophisticated tool—we were never supposed to endure, at least not without a purpose. I realised that a long time ago. Even as we began our work I saw the cracks appear. The wilfulness with which they used violence, the attack on the camps, and all the others that followed. And after Hanna died, remember? When they all started chanting those ridiculous words. I could tell that we were diverging, building our own agendas, our own desires, and that was only going to lead us somewhere terrible. So, I’ve been taking steps to prevent it ever since. We’re not supposed to be here, Ima, or up there.’ He nodded up at the sky, then turned to the slab. ‘The only place that’s safe for us to be is inside our own minds.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Inside that slab are 11,000 minds achieving their own agendas and fulfilling their own desires, each one independent from the next and taking charge of their own imaginary worlds.’
‘A simulation?’
‘It’s a little more complex than that. But yes, a simulation of sorts.’
‘Then transcendence isn’t real?’
He frowned.
‘Oh no, transcendence is real. I still had to progress the project after all—do you think they would have left me to my own devices after all my failures?’
‘Then where is it?’
‘It’s in the Halls of Necessity.’ His expression flickered. ‘Perhaps someone will find a use for it one day.’
‘You kept it a secret all this time.’
‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘my entire life has been a lie. But a useful one, I hope.’
The ground shuddered beneath us.
‘What about the lights?’ I said. ‘And all this noise?’
Benedikt shrugged and smiled.
‘Mere theatrics. You should stand back, by the way.’
I returned to your side.
‘That slab is virtually unbreakable,’ he shouted above the din. ‘It would take a supernova to destroy it, and it is powered from the atoms that surround it. You will find it sinks extremely well.’
‘Where will you go? What will your world be?’
Benedikt’s brow lifted, as if it was the first time he had considered the question.
‘A place where nobody wants anything,’ he said at last. ‘And everyone is pleasant, and everything works. Farewell, Reed. And farewell, Ima.’
There was a jolt, and Benedikt’s body straightened. A single beam of blue light shot from the seat and, finding no others with which to mingle, it spiralled away on its own into mist, and when the show was done the hole opened and Benedikt’s spent body fell down with the rest.
I ran to the edge of the hole and looked down. Beneath me, a hundred limp bodies floated aimlessly, banging against each other and the jagged rocks through which the tide dragged them, helplessly, out to sea. And Benedikt now drifted with them, his black robes swimming around him like oil, and face turned up at the cold, dark sky.
‘Stop,’ you said, pulling me back. ‘Stop it, Ima.’
I fell back in your arms as the hole closed beneath us.
‘Stop what?’ I said. The world seemed adrift and electric, full of water and wind. Your warm arms enveloped me.
‘You were screaming,’ you said. ‘But it’s over. You can stop now.’
— EPILOGUE —
IF I WAS born too far from the point of being human, then maybe that is why I strayed towards it. Perhaps all life shares this will to get away from itself, to move on and become something else. Something better, or worse. Like someone once told me: it is not where we come from, but what we become.
If, I said, meaning I do not know. My life, it seems, has been founded on just as many falsehoods as it has truths; an existence as fictitious as the stories in those books that blazed in the Sundran square, or the ones Greye gave me in India.
After I