Leviathan Falls

Interlude: The Dreamers

The dreamers dream, and their dream carries them up into the familiar vastness. The swell and the flow and the minds that are empty because the light between them is the thought that they think together. The grandmothers beckon with fingers that never knew a hand. Look, look, look. And then see! And she spins and she sparkles, but he doesn’t. He holds firm as a stone in the stream, as a shadow in the light, as a thing. He stops, and by stopping, reminds.

They are threefold, and that mattered once, but the grandmothers fall gigglingly on, into themselves and through as they send seed after seed after seed into the airless wind, and some immeasurably few set root and grow back to them. Here is how we built it all, and here is how it fed us, and here is what love meant when love meant nothing, and she broadens and thins as she falls into it, but he stands still. She can feel the want in him as rich as in her, but she feels the thing that stands against the wanting and it reminds her. They are threefold, and the dream shudders like an image projected onto cloth when a wind blows. The grandmothers are dead, their voices are all songs sung by ghosts, and the truths they tell, they would tell to anyone. They cannot listen back, and the dreamer sees the hollow behind the mask. She tries to turn her head, to look behind her, to see the single living man in the land of the dead, and the gesture goes on forever, the essence of turning and turning and turning without the release of having turned—

The dream falls thread from thread and he is there, blue fireflies and black spirals. Weariness radiates from him, and she sees the flesh thin against his bones, weak and frail as God Himself in the birth pain of creation. And he turns to her and them.

She isn’t synced with the BFE floats behind her. We’re seeing the wormhole activity in the artifact falling off, but she’s going strong and Same for subject two. Anyone know what we’re looking at here? The soft, weary eyes find her and find him and find them. The dreamer tries to wake, but the other one folds into themselves like he’s hiding something against his black-scarred breast.

Keep them going, Dr. Okoye says.

And the third man hears her through their ears, and he smiles, and lowers his bull-broad, vast, and timeless head.

No trouble unless there’s trouble, the dreamer wordlessly says. And then there’s a lot of trouble.

It was an unwinnable war, the third man says. But it was fought. They were soldiers made of crepe paper and candy floss, scattered by their own guns. But they made guns. They were cobwebs who stood against a rockslide, and for all their cleverness were torn. The dreamer sees and is blind.

Fuck, Dr. Okoye says, and the third man turns to her.

I would have reached out to you if you could help me. But even these broken vessels, glorious as they are, can’t support the work now. My work.

Okay. All right. What do you mean, “my work”?

What is an empire but all humanity under the direction of a single mind? I was right, but I dreamed too small. I have seen how much more we have to be.

Not following you.

The horned god breathes out blue fires that live and die in an instant that is an eon.

There are tools at our disposal, Dr. Okoye. Tools made to fight against the enemy on the third side of the gates. I am… learning about that. I have made some progress. It is a war we can win, but not without some changes.

I’m hearing you say that you’re responsible for stopping the consciousness blinks and the changes to basic physics that the ring gate entities were doing. Is that right?

We aren’t stronger than they were. But we’re base materials. We are made from clay, and that’s our power. They were fragile, and we are robust. They had a sword but lacked the strength to wield it. I will find the sword and the map they left behind.

I’m getting lost here. A sword?

They built but were unable to effectively use certain tools that prevent the enemy from intruding into what we mean when we say the universe. But those tools exist, and I believe we can make effective use of them.

I think I understood that. In broad strokes, anyway.

In order to fully access these tools, we have to become more like them. We have to be one thing instead of billions of different ones. I am learning how to do that as well.

Are you… saying we need to become a hive mind?

Yes. Interconnected, with our thoughts and memories flowing freely between nodes. All our illusions of division washed away. Empire was the closest I could imagine to it. But—the third man gestures at himself almost in apology—I can imagine more now.

It’s all right. We’ll be safe.

Will we be people?

We’ll be better.

And with a blue-black swirl of breath he blows out the light of mind and is elsewhere.

All right. I need all the sensor data. From the Falcon, from the BFE. The ring gate. Everything. Put it all in the system. I need to understand what just happened, and I need to do it now.

Another voice. A different voice. How strange to have different voices. Ladies and gentlemen, you heard the lead researcher. By the numbers now. This is no time to get sloppy.

The dreamers open their eyes, and nothing changes.