We run for such a long period of time but I never grow tired. It feels right. I abandoned my headset. She had to cut the wires out. The wounds sting. My brain still crackles though like the hissing radio but it does not matter because I am free. Even when the feeling makes me spit out that horrible slime I am free and I am running forever. And she is also running, but not like she is free. Like she is thinking of some other thing… what else is there to think of but the freedom of our perfect legs.
Running is easier here. My strides take me several feet into the air and project me meters into the distance in a kind of slow elegant glide. There is time after each impact to look out over the red wasteland that lies outside of the perfect city. Still from this distance the light shimmers off of the dark stone. Red stone. Dark red stone… like the blood of those guards.
Her voice is in my head. Why is her voice in my head. What is she saying.
“I can hear you.” She is saying.
No she can’t.
“Yes… I can.”
No she can’t.
“Yes I can… Look. This is silence my friend. You had no idea that for… how many years?… the ‘Voice of GOD’ was just the babble of the City. Your mind… my mind… they radiate. We… feel… together. This is what it is to be away from the pack. This is what they have made us. Do not worry. I do not listen to what you say… I do not care what you say… it is only… do not judge me for doing what I was made to do. Do you understand me?”
No. This is the drugs. Stop.
She stops immediately. Her feet dig into the ground several inches as her weight distributes itself perfectly throughout her body. She turns around. She looks directly into my eyes.
“You have a lot to learn. Quickly. To begin with, you did not decide to stop taking the pills. Nobody decides to stop taking the pills. There is no such possibility within you. We contacted your mind… with pirated frequencies… and we inserted directives into you… for years. And it all led up to now. Right now. Do you know what you do? What you did? Every day?”
I worked with the machines.
“Yes, but do you remember the work? Do you remember what the machines look like? What the machines did?”
……………………….. no
Silence.
Oh… no.
“You do. Now.”
The feeling, the spit.
No…… what is this horrible thing.
The entire landscape of my mind is taken up with some thing I cannot understand. It is so immense. I am seeing it through a window. I am sitting at a machine. A computer. It has a name. I make decisions…
“Yes… you did.”
“About its brain. About what it does.”
“Yes… you do. What is its name?”
It is the Sun Bird… and it was built to consume Stars.
“Yes… but what about the planets and the moons?”
Those… are destroyed as well… It is all destroyed… oh no.
“Oh yes.”
What……. what do you want? What have I done?
She moves closer to me. She puts her hand on my helmet. And she says “You have destroyed entire galaxies from a gilded castle made only to house and entertain you. And now you will help us to stop this. You are the last part of our plan. You will save everything in the universe… and all you have to do is destroy one more little galaxy.”
There is a feeling now… it is different than the spit… it is in… it… I cannot explain….. it feels so beautiful…
“It is love. It is called love.”
You can feel it?
“No… but I can feel yours.” her eyes are like the glass buildings… silent and inert and then something inside of me hurts and I realize that I have never felt pain before and then there are more feelings but they are all bad…
She turns away.
“You will learn.” and she bounds off.
I let her lead by a long distance until I think that she can not hear my thoughts.
Why does she not also feel love?
“Because I am a planet destroyer too. But there was no castle for me to do it from. I did it with my own two hands. And I will have to do a lot more of it before I can live in peace. And because… I was not made to feel. Or rather I was not made to explain how I feel. Anyways, do not turn to hate. There is much work to be done and we cannot speak of broken hearts.”
What is hate? What do you mean broken heart? My heart is not broken. I am perfectly functional. You see that I run.
“It is a saying.”
“What is a “saying.” That is an absurd combination of words. I do not understand how “saying” could be used as a noun.
“Please be quiet. Maybe continue thinking about freedom. That was a much more interesting time in this who journey. Or perhaps you could think less and run faster because you are running at about 65 percent efficiency.”
I will think of nothing for the rest of this trip.
Nothing…
Nothing…..
It is beautiful to run and to be free.
The Paper Trail 