Aron shot up from his bed as soon as his eyes fluttered open. He could still feel the earth pound with thunderous footsteps from the beast that chased him on the Plane just a few seconds ago. Sitting at the edge of his bed, he rubbed his eyes with frustration.
Should I try to go back? He wondered to himself. He looked at the clock on his desk across the bedroom. There’s still time. But this guy is too strong for me, he grudgingly confessed to himself. Something’s not right here.
He pushed himself off the mattress and walked to his desk. He began shuffling through various documents, photos, notes, and graphs. He let out a long breath through his nose and hung his head down with his eyes closed.
Think, Aron, he commanded himself. Why can’t you get past this guy? Aron sat down at his desk, resting his jaw on the palms of his hands. In his mind, he began to replay the confrontation he just had on the Plane. He recalled back to the beginning.
Before going to the Plane, Aron began in his subconscious, where all plebs and Readers begin. He was in his old backyard from childhood: in Georgia, at his Uncle Myron’s house. He was standing in front of the big chicken-wire cage where his uncle kept his pet mongoose, Magoo. How his uncle had obtained that mongoose and managed to keep it for so long, Aron never knew.
He walked past the cage toward a rusted, iron hatch door that was slightly raised from the ground. Aron reached down and began turning the wheel that released the hatch door. With one last, long screech from the wheel, Aron pulled the hatch open and let it rest on its hinges, pointing straight up. There was nothing but pure darkness inside.
“Once more down the mongoose hole,” he said as he looked over his shoulder to Magoo. Then he jumped in.
There was a quick flash of bright, purpled light and suddenly he landed. Aron was atop a hill that overlooked a small valley. On the opposite side of the valley stood a larger hill. He was standing exactly where he had left his sigil the night before on the Plane. It dissipated underneath him into a tiny cloud of purple dust.
In the violet darkness of the mimicked night, Aron peered around at the vast and mysterious topography of the Plane. He was amazed yet again with its layout. He thought about all of the weird, terrifying, and beautiful things he had seen so far during his years on the Plane. He also wondered about the citadels, people, and creatures that had been here before, and what things still remained and skulked from ancient years.
He began navigating down the hill and then started to think about what things he would leave on the Plane, if anything. What things have I built that will last, after I’m gone? Aron reflected.
He thought about the first autonomous golem he created when he was starting college. In his early years on the Plane, Aron had woven simple golems through the guidance of his mentor, Yusef. When Aron was ready to graduate to advanced independent golems and Yusef instructed him to go with a simple mud or stone one, Aron was too excited. He wanted more of a challenge and something really worth remembering as his first self-operating golem. He studied the biology of a carp to weave it with an elder tree sapling, a tree fabled to have protective powers against ancient evil.
The thought of those two contradictory organisms combined together to make a golem was amusing to Aron, and it was such an odd pairing that once he had thought it up, his curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied until he actually made it and saw it come to life.
In fact, Aron had thought of a name for his golem before he had even made it. At the time, Yusef had recently taught him about Japanese Shinto gods, so he decided on naming his golem Ebisu, after the god of luck for fishermen and agriculture.
It fit perfectly, Aron had thought, for a golem that would undoubtedly accompany him on his travels through the Plane. He wondered what exactly it would look like and how it would function as a fish and a tree. Perhaps he should have thought it out more clearly.
Aron didn’t like thinking about Ebisu. He had nightmares about it for years. And even his nightmares couldn’t completely recall how gruesome and terrifying Ebisu had turned out to be. Its scaled bark and slimy tentacles reeked of decayed earth and sea. Ebisu’s amber eyes fluttered with wild alertness. They had a depth matched only by Aron’s regret and fear of his own imagination and curiosity.
A shiver ran through Aron as he thought about where Ebisu was lurking now, and what it had become after so many years if it had survived. He wondered about all of the other monstrosities he had created, by accident or with intent, and what other horrors other Readers had carelessly or maliciously woven on the Plane. When it’s my time to pass on, I hope I leave behind something more than just monsters, he thought again.
Aron now refocused on the valley below him. Making his way around a small town, Aron headed for a particular street of houses that rested on the foothills. He was very close to finding the den of Bob Tilson after weeks of researching and mapping. Aron even spent a few nights managing to avoid wraiths, but he eventually ended up having to fight one off.
It wasn’t uncommon to come across a wraith in areas where many people slept. The chances of someone having nightmares, and thus a wraith being present, were much higher in cities and dense suburban neighborhoods. The odds of their presence and their ferociousness increased even further where suffering occurred. Fear, anger, and sadness were the main elements that caused wraiths to form on the Plane.
Poor folks suffer greatly and have lots of problems, Aron knew. But you don’t really know how bad they are until you run into one of their wraiths, he had thought.
That wasn't to say that there weren’t wraiths out in the rural parts. Things were just so spread out that it was harder to actually run into one.
Then there was the putrisomn. Aron spent the next half hour carefully navigating through various hives of it as he made his way through the quiet mountain town. He came across the glossy form in blacks, browns, dark purples, grays, and greens. It grew thick like strong oaks and sagged like weeping willows. The putrisomn spread onto walls like veins and spread out on its own like vines. In other places, the proliferation formed pentagons, carapaces, and spirals.
However he found it, raw putrisomn always seemed to have a faint pulse, as if alive. Aron always felt uneasy, like the putrisomn had eyes, but it didn’t watch what he did as much as it watched what he was feeling. But he had grown used to it by this point, and after all of the months of hard work he had dedicated to finding Bob Tilson’s hideout on the Plane, he wasn’t about to lose his cool over some overgrown putrisomn.
Of course, Aron knew where Bob Tilson officially was the entire time. Everyone in America did. He was the U.S. Congressman from Meridian, Idaho. When he was elected last year, he publicly stated that undocumented immigrants “are only good for one thing, and that’s cleaning up after real Americans.” The United States was already overpopulated, he reasoned. He wanted to change the law so that green cards were no longer given out and immigrants living in the States could not be naturalized into U.S. citizens.
“I know that brings up another big question,” Congressman Tilson had said. “What do we do with the illegals that are here already?” Aron remembered watching Tilson on the television when he made this statement on the floor of Congress. Tilson gave an innocent shrug at this last question he raised. “Well, we can’t hunt them down and exterminate them like animals, and deporting them takes too much time and money,” he said with a grin. “A wall was a good idea. But it’s expensive, slow, and can be circumvented.”
Then he held up something small and white, pinched in between his thumb and his forefinger. “And we can’t let them keep multiplying, either. So here’s our answer.” The camera zoomed in on his smiling face and the pill he held. “This little pill prevents the patient from having any children. It also contains nanochips that take an imprint of the patient’s DNA, which registers with a government-issued identification number that will be used to electronically track the patient. The illegals that are here already can stay. But real, honest American jobs can’t be taken by them anymore. They’ll have special jobs. And they can’t have kids anymore. That’s the price to pay to live in America without being an American.” By this point, Tilson’s grin turned into a full smile. His arms went up in the air to welcome the applause from other congressional members.
Aron had thought that angry constituents would have dragged Tilson out of his office by the end of the day after giving that speech, but that never happened. In fact, Congress members from his party promoted it, calling it “the Tilson Plan.” And of course, the President had endorsed it immediately. It wasn’t his idea, but it might as well have been. Besides, anything more controversial to get the public’s attention away from his own ongoing political gaffes and investigations he very much welcomed.
Tilson was becoming a lightning rod for public attention. Some people had even talked about having him run as vice president in the next election. Others were starting to suggest that he should run in place of the current President, who was deeply embattled with political opponents on both sides of the aisle amid impeachment charges and various scandals.
Aron had seen this story before: the charismatic man who makes many promises of solving the imaginary problems of his people, all the time convincing them of what and whom they should fear. It had many forms throughout history. He saw it in the patrician politicians from ancient Rome leading to the fall of the Republic. He saw it in revolutionaries who started with good intentions but brought horrific results to their own people, as did Robespierre, and Mao Zhedong. And he definitely saw it in leaders with the worst of intentions, like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Aron wasn’t about to wait around to see what Tilson’s intentions -- or results -- were. He knew that this man wanted one thing and wanted it all for himself: power. And Tilson saw the power vacuum that lay ahead with the President’s inevitable idiotic fall from grace. Tilson was willing to do anything to be the person to fill it when he was gone.
There weren’t many people standing up to this man, and the few who did weren’t heard or weren’t saying the right things. So Aron recognized this moment like so many other crucial moments in human history. It was a moment when good people had to rise and take action. I’ve had enough of the adults in my generation -- and the ones before -- who sat around watching the world fall apart, expecting someone else to fix it. He knew he had to take a stand because no one else would.