The Hikari Paradox

Everett's Reconciliation I

He was staring at his reflection for quite some time now. There was something odd with it, it was too bright. He knew its exact shade on that window, the tall glass of Erebus Space Company, his beloved home. It was by far more exciting to be inside the lab tinkering with concepts and new ways to revolutionize the global science scene, and the amazing overlooking view of Tsentralny district was in all aspects better than the one at home.

But today, his skin was brighter than usual. The whole city was. Konstantin looked up and marveled at the sky. It was as if staring at a suspended mountain slope, covered in blinding snow; endless bright. It wasn’t about the shade of his skin, but the world itself. It was a bright Tuesday, dazzling enough for him to make a brand-new discovery.

He had been working on a new theory for quite some time, but there were still a few missing links there, as if he had an almost complete chain to reach perfection, yet missed two or three links. It was frustrating to be so close to finding an answer that once discovered could have had the potential to change the face of society yet again, but to feel as if the calculation itself was merely two IQ points smarter than him. His fields of study were quite complex, he knew that, but they weren’t quite the most labyrinthine of them all. So, for an enlightened brain such as his, a theory on the self-generation of metamaterials should have been a walk in the park. Except it wasn’t. He wasn’t strolling through an apple orchard, but was crawling through trenches, avoiding landmines and aerial attacks.

“It’s quite a strange occurrence, isn’t it?” a female voice asked, her foreign accent quite strong.

Konstantin turned, facing the woman. She was half a head taller than him, and her features were darkened by the blight above. Still, no other woman but Cielle could have pranced so tall and mighty, dressed in a tight black dress, her eyewear flashing magenta and blue.

“Excuse me?” Konstantin said, patting his suit. “I’m afraid I can’t understand what you’re talking about.”

Cielle frowned, her forehead drawing a faint wrinkle right in the middle of her thin eyebrows. She was quite an astonishing woman, a robotics engineer whose designs had stormed the worldwide tech scene, as they were quite funky, just like her, and amazingly practical.

“Well, that,” she said, pointing up, the line of her collarbone intensifying.

If Konstantin would have been interested in women, or s****l intercourse in general, there would have been no other woman but Cielle to excite his hypothetical passions. As of late, he had been bombarded by family and colleagues to find a woman for himself, to build a family, for they thought that was the final achievement of a human being. But it was just biological programming, the base genetic information instilled in their DNA demanding the continuity of the species. Of course, these breeding programs were hidden behind complex concepts such as emotions, attraction, s****l desire, and why not, the fear of being alone, but in the end, these were the result of neurochemistry going haywire, as the ancient genes dictated. Multiply, progress, maintain the human race these genes demanded.

“It’s quite odd, isn’t it? Well? You’re the astrophysicist, so stop looking at me like a dumb ox and tell me if that’s normal.”

Konstantin shrugged, and straightened his suit again, squinting at the sky.

“It’s not particularly natural,” he said. “I’ll just head to my observatory and read the sky. I’m really curious what our satellites see beyond these clouds.”

“So, you think they’re clouds, eh?” Cielle said, her lips contouring a smile. “If they’re clouds, it’s incredible how compact and… clean they are. It’s like Russia itself is covered in a puffy blanket, right?”

Konstantin nodded, then bowed his head, stepping forward.

“Wait, Konstantin,” she said, playing with a strand of her hair. “After work, come meet me. I want to take you out for dinner. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I will be overburdened with social duties, so I won’t be able to spend it the way I want. Honestly, if you’d see my family, you’d probably go insane.”

Konstantin stood silent, eyes locked with hers. She averted her gaze and clutched her purse, her long nails biting into the leather.

“So, what do you say? Do you want to… you know, join me?”

“Yes, I’ll be there at half past six,” Konstantin said, nodding absently. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must see to my daily duties. Have a pleasant day.”

“You too. Look at those clouds and tell me everything about them. I’ll be expecting this tonight, okay?”

Shaking his head, Konstantin spun on his heels, pacing hurriedly toward Tsentralny’s tallest building. People bustled and frolicked around and above him, on the glass terraces of the superior levels, all caught up in their daily chores. As he passed a VR arcade, he saw a teenager falling on the ground, his friends laughing at his clumsiness. He got up, smiling, and gently punched one boy’s shoulder, joking about something. They all laughed, and the next player submerged himself in the VR game.

It was beautiful, Tsentralny. A place of freedom and peace, where there was no suffering, no famine, and thanks to his friend Vladimir, the questionably sane microbiologist, sooner rather than later there was going to be no diseases left either. A place of progress, just a few miles away from the world’s most visited city, Saskia’s gothic graveyard of souls.

“What’s that,” a man asked, sheltering his eyes with an open hand.

Konstantin glanced up again, and pain shot through his skull. His retina almost scorched, he blinked rapidly to regain sight, then dared look at the horizon. It all came as if torn from the world of fairytales, eerie silence all around, as the world stood still. His mind snapped, and refused to compute, like a broken CPU, unable to run its processes.

The buildings in the distance were simply vanishing into the light, dark particles lingering for a while after, only to be swallowed by the whiteness. It was coming towards them, steadily, fast, like a veil of holy sanctity, purifying everything. His nervous system froze, and all he could do was just stand there and gaze at the serene image of the Sankt Petersburg being razed and swallowed by eternity. Light reached him, and everything, himself included, ceased to exist.

‘Where am I?’ he thought, struggling to open his eyes.

A deep rumble, like the sound of distant thunder, cracked from somewhere behind. But even behind was a strange concept, as he felt timeless, spaceless. There was no flesh attached to his mind, no bones, just a cool sensation of immateriality, paradoxically associated with wholeness, a feeling of being one with everything. Whatever space unfolded around him, for he couldn’t see it, started grumbling with the sounds of the deep space. Strange screeches, otherworldly, originating somewhere at distances beyond comprehension even for his enlightened mind. Still, where he was now, he no longer possessed only the post-cortex, it was as if he had been offered a tesseract of his own, a fractal space; platonic solids, polyhedrons for him to shape in the form of a new universe.

He had expanded, watching the old Konstantin through a new pair of eyes. A million of them, all connected to a superior brain of a superior Konstantin, whose capacity far surpassed whatever he had thought possible. If the Tree of Bodhi had been Buddha’s place of enlightenment in old religion, he was now under it, the flow of the universe coursing through his inexistent sanguine systems. There was knowledge there, creation, something he couldn’t quite grasp or theorize, but feel. A distant pulse whispering to him about the matrix of everything, calculus of dark matter, the substance of the Big Bang, the path of a rejuvenating universe.

Vibration… photons… visions of galaxies and stars. A murder of crows passed by, croaking, as the wind rustled invisible leaves. A forest, somewhere else, not where he was… A star exploded nearby, the scent of stardust drying his nostrils. But stardust couldn’t have had a scent… and he had no nostrils. An embryo floated in the darkness, its skin pale, the color of frozen water. It was there, consuming his mind like a cosmic vacuum, a shell for his new existence.

Up the stairway, it said, as Konstantin merged with it, his mind becoming its flesh. He looked around, still having no eyes to see, but his body was there, growing, as seasons passed by on a conceptual sky, the day/night cycle spinning rapidly. The forest dried, as red flares of a setting sun reflected the pure whiteness of untrodden snow. Then flowers erupted in a game of neon colors, a green serpent slithering through branches. Scorching sun then came, as fruit ripened, only for the forest to wither again.

It all spun, as the frequency of the universe hummed around him, the crows echoing in the distance. He was one with all, now an old man, struggling to support his weary body against the trunk of an infinite oak, its roots extending as far as his mind could see.

Open your eyes.