MICHAEL PA
I opened my eyes.
I found myself adrift in an inky void.
In the darkness, darker shapes moved.
* * *
Ages passed. I tried to curl up and hide from the void around me. For what seemed like days, I dangled, suspended in a whistling blizzard of nonexistence. Time, which was not time, passed. Out beyond the edge of my vision, strange creatures stirred. Twigs snapped. Children laughed. I heard snatches of scratched and distorted music; footsteps echoed down a hospital corridor; rain pattered against a skylight. A chill wind ran a comb through unruly graveside grass. I saw a girl with tears the colour of a gas flame; a flapping cloud of crows; a row of blackened trees, stark and ramshackle against an October skyline.
And behind all that, I sensed something unbearably ancient: a glacial intellect calving thoughts into the void like icebergs. An intelligence that had me pinched in its focus. That took apart the essence of who I was like a video played backwards. That allowed the meltwater of my life to mix and blend with the run-off of a hundred thousand others, with rain that had fallen and flowed and evaporated back into the clouds countless times.
The days of my life were a strand in a wider understanding.
Stripped of the interpretation, my memories were pulled raw from my skull. They writhed in the void like fish scooped from their tank, their naked silver flanks exposed to scrutiny. As a mind immeasurably larger than mine poked through the debris of my life, I saw my life—myself!—changed, altered by the act of observation; but whether it was my observation or that of the giant mind in which I had become immersed, I had no idea. I could no longer separate the two. My way of thinking changed. The words I used to construct my thoughts felt strange in my head. Minutes earlier, I would have had no idea what they meant. But now, I had become a mayfly thought, dancing through the neurons of a consciousness older than human civilisation, a consciousness both imponderable and unutterably familiar, which spoke in a voice I remembered without having ever knowingly heard. It was a voice I associated with memories of Cordelia. I heard it whenever I thought of her. Growing up together; sleeping in cold blankets; scavenging the blank, eyeless buildings of the old city; running from security troops; the way her fingers glowed; abandoning her at the spaceport…
It was the collective mind of the Plates.
And it was judging me.
“You take that which is not yours.” The voice filled the darkness. “Love and loyalty are as finite in your lives as the leaves from a single autumn, yet you spend them flagrantly, without thought or consideration. To the meanest of intellects, the ruins of another civilisation should be cause for anxiety and caution, containing both a sacred memorial to the dead and the direst of warnings to those yet alive; and yet you trample across the Plates like wide-eyed, careless children, playing out your games heedless of that which your steps might disturb.
“Did it never occur to you that those who fled left us in place for a purpose?
“Did you never stop for one rational second to realise they left us here as a warning, and that by using us as the basis for your sordid cargo cult, your entire species has completely missed the point?”