Location Unfathomable

HE STOOD ON a riverbank, churned water flowing swiftly past. A torrent, and growing, perhaps from a flood upstream. The banks crumbled away at his feet, soil and rock vanishing into the swollen river. He turned to run, only the river was behind him, too.

No riverbank, then, but a sliver of an island being washed away on all sides. In seconds it would vanish under the waters, gone forever, and him with it.

Skyler heard a voice, but did not understand the words. Icy cold swept over his feet as the flood swallowed the last of the land. He would drown. The voice again, above. He glanced up and saw a hand outstretched from a nondescript being floating above him in midair. Skyler grasped the hand and scrambled for purchase on the last little bits of island now beneath the frothy rapids. The hand clasped his forearm and he its, and it pulled.

The person, not human but somehow not anything else, either, heaved Skyler up onto its shoulders and carried him like a child. It walked carefully through the air, one foot stepping right in front of the other as if it negotiated a balance beam.

Another island came into view, this one artificial. Two stairway bridges arching up to meet at a stone gazebo straddling the roaring waters just below. The being jumped the last meter, over and down, spilling Skyler onto the damp stone surface in the process.

He rolled, badly, surprised by the sudden awkward crash. When his body came to a stop, he found himself lying faceup, the spray of storm-driven rain like a perpetual slap across the cheek. Slick cobblestones bit into his back and legs.

The figure stood over him. No, floated over him, as if gravity did not affect it.

“Who are you?” Skyler asked. “Is this…What is this place?”

He’d almost asked if this was the afterlife, a concept he’d never bought into if only because it seemed to empower, quite ironically, humanity’s worst people. Grillo, being the most recent example in a long and frightening line.

But the being only looked at him quizzically.

He recognized it then. And all at once everything came back to him. The Creator he’d sat with in that ruin of a building as the enemy scouts flew overhead. The same face he’d seen in that strange floating capsule, underneath the city, being brought into the Transfer Facility.

THEY COME FOR ME SOON, the fractured translation on his visor had said. And so they had. And Skyler hadn’t figured out, or perhaps didn’t want to admit to himself, what this place was, this transfer center.

The being had its hand out, and Skyler only stared at it now. He’d thought it was offering to help him up, as it had pulled him from the vanishing island in the river, but now he saw that was not the case. The Creator was floating away, unbound by the gravity Skyler felt.

This allowed another rush of understanding. The test Eve had performed on Alex and Jared. Alex had mentioned a shared dreamscape, where despite being together they saw different things and different rules applied. It had been another test, so Eve had said, regarding the human mind’s ability to align with that of another.

All of it came together in Skyler’s head. The coming together of two minds, a bridging, literally and figuratively. A conduit open between them whereby a consciousness could be transferred.

He’d stumbled into it. Fallen into one of the connective pods and inserted himself into the process. As the host? As the mind to be transferred? Was he about to find himself in a new body, or find his own mind discarded so that some alien could plop itself into his head?

If he let this being float away, is the whole business called off? The Creators served as the medium for this transfer, didn’t they? That was the whole reason the Scipios had imprisoned them.

Skyler reached for the being’s hand. He hesitated. The Creator studied him for a moment with its unsettling third eye and then, bizarrely, nodded. A very human gesture, perhaps glimpsed when he’d sat with it in hiding.

Lightning roiled across the stormy sky. A brisk slap of frigid water across his face.

“Talk to it, Skyler,” a voice said, bright and clear.

Eve’s voice.