Neon / Book One - 2. Encounter

Cover Artwork: Athdara-Seleya


Susan progressively calmed down. She knew that screaming was perfectly useless. First, it produced no sound. Second, there was probably no one there to hear her. She had heard of testimonies from persons who went through near-death experiences. The consciousness progressively separating from the body, the sensation of floating in the air, like a disembodied entity. Was she experiencing something similar? She tried to recall the events that had preceeded her awaking in the “white”, as she had began to think of it. Everything was so blurred as she tried to hang on bribes of memories from the previous day: drops of sweat falling from her brow as the sun hit hard in the fields, the joyful mood at diner as work was going on well, the perspective of a quiet moment in the storage room before going to bed... Nothing life-threatening there. And suddendly it came back to her. The glowing spheres. A sudden dizziness had overcome her as she was examining one of those sphere's ultrastructure... and she had awaken in the white.

She really had no clue as to what had happened to her. At least she was alive and well, as far as concerned her mind. Her memory was functioning properly, her train of thought was of the usual analytical type - at least when she managed to overcome her emotions. What has become of her body was another matter. Not that she had ever loved her body that much - she had always frowned at that slightly round belly of hers - but it was quite convenient for a daily human life. What worried her most what her total isolation from the rest of the world - if the world as she knew it still existed. She forced herself to discard that irrational thought - the world was not supposed to disappear into thin air with a pop - this was for sci-fi stories. She wondered whether she would ever grow accustomed to the total absence of sounds. But she did not have to wait much longer before getting an answer.

The silence was broken by screams, going on and on. Reacting instinctively she turned around and darted toward the source of the sound. It did not occur to her that it was the first time she was able to move since she had awaken in the white. She spotted an indefinite shape about a hundred meters from her (distances were hard to perceive in a uniformly coloured environment) and speeded toward it. The shape was that of a man, contorted with terror, his head tilted back as he kept on screaming with all the intensity of his voice.

'It's OK, I'm coming' shouted Susan, as she crossed the few meters separating her from the man. She was startled to hear her own voice, as she had only intended to project reassuring thoughts toward him with her mind. 'So things are beginning to work again in that place', she told herself.

As the man did not acknowledge her and went on screaming, she knelt in front of him and placed her hands on his shoulders, shaking him gently. 'There, you're not alone anymore. I'm here too' she tried to reassure him. The man finally opened his eyes and met hers.
'Who are you? Are you a ghost?' He asked in a shaking voice.
'I am as human and alive as you are' Susan replied in a soothing voice, smiling at the question. 'I can see that you are finally regaining your wits, after such a terror.'
'I thought I was dead, I thought I had become a spirit' he murmured.
'Well we cannot be perfectly sure that this is not the case, but this is not how I had imagined life after death.'
'Nor I...' he admitted. 'Who are you, if you are not a ghost, nor an angel?' he asked.
'I am a researcher, specialist in plant science. My name is Susan Sullivan. Other than that, I love cats and spaceships' Susan replied, slightly amused. 'What about you? I know only about your fear of white for the moment.'
'I'm John Burtok. I live in Bristol, England. I've had several jobs in my life, but since a few years I've been chief editor at a local newspaper.'
'How surprising! I myself live in the suburbs of Bristol and work at Bristol university.'
'Well that's the hell of a coincidence. Now you're gonna tell me how you happened to come running into me in the middle of nowhere!'

Susan proceeded to tell him the events of the last hours, in her clear rational way, from the strange behaviour of the birds she had witnessed to the astonishing sphere's structure she had observed with the microscope. John listened silently, refraining from interrupting her, his mind working hard to find some sense in all this.
'So you've seen the tiny glowing spheres too...' he told her, thoughtful, when she had finished with her tale. 'They were so strange, so alien, floating in the air like that, like fairy mist...'
'Now you tell me of your own experience' Susan urged him gently.
In a colourful and animated narration, John told her about his growing sense of strangeness, the shifting of reality around him, and how the building and its inhabitants had rejected him.
'This is really weird. As if you had been in another level of reality when entering that building. Somehow very much like your homeplace, but different as you were a stranger there, you did not belong to that place.' Susan giggled. 'I shouldn't have read that many sci-fi novels, my imagination is running completely wild...'
'This is not surprising, after all we've been through. And look around us, that white, all around...' he stopped in mid-sentence, now lost in contemplation of their surroundings.

Open-mouthed, they discovered that the white had dissipated and had been replaced by a mountainous scenery while they were so deeply involved in their discussion. Huge mountains barred the horizon in every direction. They themselves were stationed on an elevated outcrop of rock which provided an advantageous viewpoint of the area. Bright green stretches of grassland in the valleys, darker patches of woodland and rocky mountain tops formed a very typical alpine landscape.

'This is beautiful' said Susan at last, after a few silent minutes of contemplation. Still she could not grasp the faint sense of strangeness that emanated from the view. 'But it somehow feels... wrong.'
'What do you mean by “wrong”? It looks definitively much more natural than that damned white everywhere' John retorted.
'More pleasing to the eye and less disturbing for our senses, yes, but maybe not more “natural”' answered Susan. 'Choose a small given area, and look closely at the colours. Select one that is not too homogeneous in colour, it will be easier. Do you detect something weird?'
'Okay let's try with that group of trees down there. I can clearly see the shape of each tree, the shadows under their canopy. The plants growing on the undergrown.'
'Focus on the variations of colours, the delimitation between patches of colours.' Susan went on.
'Well it kind of is quite... abrupt. I mean, not that smooth and...' John tried temptatively.
'You've got it! Look how the variations of colours are discontinuous - “abrupt” as you put it. You could delineate with thin lines the patches of different colours. It's not smooth, nor curved. It's linear, straight. Geometrical' Susan said with her precise scientist wording.  
'Like a giant multicolored mosaic?'
'Yes, that's the idea. What we are seeing here is not real. Not “natural”. It's a digital tri-dimensional image. The definition of the image is good, but not good enough to avoid detection under closer examination. Ever looked very closely at a printed image? You must have seen tiny dots of colours. Pixels. That's what we're seeing here'.
'So you're telling me that what we're seeing, the sky, the mountains and all, nothing of it does exist?' asked John, still fighting with the notion.
'Well it might actually exist somewhere, but what we see here is a reconstructed image of it.'
'You mean an advanced life-form has transported us to a holosuite? We're now within an episode of Startrek? Fascinating.'
'Now I am the one who's supposed to be the sci-fi fan here!' replied Susan with a grin.
'What kind of newspaper editor would I be if I knew nothing of pop culture?' John teased her.
'So I believe you've got the communicator frequency of Mr. Scott and will ask him to beam us back to our own reality right away?' Susan asked, as she began to relax for the first time since she had awaken in the white.
'I wish I had' John replied pensively. 'But I forgot to ask him last time I met him' he added, just to keep that smile on Susan's face.
'How much I wish Spock was there. I'm sure he'd know what to do. He always does. He's so used to such situations, after all' Susan sighed.
'I don't have pointed ears, but I know we'll quite soon meet whom is behind this all' John said with a firm voice.
'How can you be so sure? We even have no idea whether it's a “who” or a “what” we're dealing with. And even if we...' Words died on Susan's lips as her eyes grew wider and wider.

Four glowing spheres were speeding toward them, projecting unnatural light on the artificial landscape. Similar in appearance, these ones were much larger sized than the minuscule luminous spheres they had witnessed before. Susan reflexively clung to John's forearm, as her facial features tensed at the approach of the large spheres. 'Looks like we've been watched all the time' she said in hushed tones. The spheres slowed down as they closed up on the two still humans. They slowly encircled them, and began to emit a high pitched buzzing sound. The vision around Susan and John became somehow blurred, as if looking through imperfectly transparent glass.

'Look! They've encapsulated us within a transparent surface' said Susan, as she reached out with her fintertips. 'It's flexible but it looks quite robust.'
Both of them lost their balance before John had time to answer, as the transparent bubble began to ascend swiftly  into the air. They stared in mute astonishment as the ground grew more and more distant below their feet, the spheres speeding toward the valley. They did not notice the transparent wall that progressively grew between them inside the bubble, encapsulating them into two distinct compartments. But terror struck them as the large bubble finally cleaved into two smaller bubbles, moving off toward opposite directions.
'John...!' Susan shouted to her companion of misfortune, as panic overwhelmed her, her hands hopelessly pounding on the transparent boundary.
'Susan...!' John's desperate cries echoed Susan's.

And suddendly the two bubbles blew out, precipitating the two humans into emptiness.

                 ***

He was going to die. In the end, whoever was behind his abduction had decided to get rid of him. Of both of them. Susan...
She too was going to meet her death quite soon. Was she currently analysing their chance of surviving the impact on the ground? No, she was a biologist, not a physicist. He wished he had been allowed more time to know her better. To discuss with her the reality of their situation, perched on that rock up there. Or the lack of reality. Was this even real? The large spheres, the transparent bubble, the free fall... Why would it be real, after all?

No, he must be imagining this, this must be some more illusions, played on him by someone... At this last thought things suddendly changed around him. The rush of air on his body ceased, the sensation of acceleration desappeared and he landed softly on a smooth surface. The fall had however taken its tool on him and he lost consciousness.

                        ***

The fall went on as she kept screaming.  She was nothing more than a continous primal scream while her body contorted in horror. Her mind was a void, she could no more think nor see. The terror finally overwhelmed her and Susan lost consciousness, as the endless fall went on and on.


Book One Chapters 1 |2|3