About a certain return

Part 19

"I cannot feel his heart!" just said the woman leaning over me when I probably came to my senses.

"May he didn't have a heart, this ugly one!" grunted a chap, "but he seems to be breathing!" "Yah, what a smell...! A living corpus...!"

"He's not dead? He's really breathing?" "How did he get to you?"

"The professor brought him. Wrapped up in clothes like a dead body. How should I know what they did to him? He had been cut and sawed back in place, and look what a monster! I'm afraid to be left alone with him!"

I couldn't open my eyes... but... but I could see! I could see an apparition... a fantastic being like a prehistorically animal whose name I didn't know. And it seemed guided by a man placed inside. When the noise inside the room grew bigger, it seemed I could see it better! Then it went away... I didn't see the woman. What happened? How did I end up laying on a table inside a tiny room, in the presence of that animal? It went away waving its huge hands and got out through a corridor while I moved and fell down on my back between the stone table and the wall. It has a very narrow space and I struggled to get out of there...

"Where am I?"

"Patient 400-155 cannot be stabilized after using the healing medium «Amon-Ra», test version "G»... Maybe somebody mistook it."

I heard the woman voice, then a buzzing: "First suggestion: Buzz!" A male's voice: "Insert a new command «Choose! » and ask him to choose all the cognition fields in one go. He might be able to avoid numerous adjoining searches. He will understand how much he needs to choose form.

"Second suggestion: Buzz!", "You'd better close this search in favor of another program. I recommend you «Revelation» and even «Subterranean», even it support another risk degree.

"Third suggestion:", "The whole millions of questions can be reduced to a single one: How to transfer the inside head ideas to be able to act. Start studying the method «TPA»".

"What's going on here?" I was asking within myself somebody was spreading around an ugly and disgusting dust... Hey, this dust, do you know? It shouldn't be spread on dead bodies? And the voices were distorted... I got out of the room on a stair head. A lot of stair heads, a lot of boxes... A prison?

"Suggestion number four: ...", "I retested «Amon-Ra» version "G" but it doesn't work. I detected the bug but couldn't fix it. I will keep the program open as long as somebody with better access can roll it. I'm waiting to tell me then I'll close it completely..."

"Suggestion five:", "I believe that in fact, «Amon-Ra» is well functioning, and the patient will recover"...

There was nobody. The voices... But the voices? I looked at the boxes 'walls, they were scribbled with unreadable graffiti. What marks! I remember those: «IS 577» How do I pronounce it? A frightening cry came out of me.

Immediately I heard the woman: "Problems with numeric fields' names." "Suggestion number one:", "It seems there is a problem with the knowledge take over. We had a similar problem when multiple versions of «Paradigm» were used.", "Suggestion number two: Me again. I believe the defection is fixed to the two-four-zero version of the program. I fixed it and it works.", "Suggestion number three: Try the version 2.5!"...

"It works" does that mean "it's remedied?" I made two-three steps... That way? Back? "Hrrgrbzzzp!" This is what I shouted trying to reproduce what had been scribbled on the wall. The scribble was slowly flowing and about to erase itself... That dye smelled strangely, strongly. I tasted it! Salted... It was spread on the stone floor. It was bogging in places and here and there it seemed it hardened... I saw a box slightly rocking. I shouted again and I could see the sound uttered by me, I don't know how to put it, I could see it coming towards me from all the directions, like a lightening of that room. Such a thing was rather unusual, astonishing, almost funny, and I made the trick several times... Then I got bored and got inside the swinging box. I pressed a board protruding from the wall and the box started to climb up making noises. I could "see" floor after floor, they all seemed identical with the passed one, only with some slight alterations, so that when the box stopped and I had to get out, the change become total.

Something wonderful was going on inside me. Something was sending me to the final mystery: to meet my own self, I was lost and had to find myself... Must I? I believe I was forced to do so...

"Suggestion 4: The program that I'm using, «Masterer», has unlimited resources. It's based on the siblic matrixes method. Why don't you use the same program?" "Suggestion 5: But I have been using it and I believe it works very well. Here it must be something else!" "Suggestion 6: Did I wrong, maybe, the utility privileges?

I walked up the stairs to get to... Then I saw the Dome. And when I said "I saw" I really meant "I saw it". But I wasn't alone, I actually was "Them". "I" was a team, or that team was "I". What a hell of a hallucination! But everything made sense. So many conflicting trends in my personality, so much uncertainty, so many hesitations, but also moments of power in times of need... And the Dome was slowly turning, slightly discernible, but it was spinning. I didn't think it was the floor which was turning... "The Dome?" said one of us. "We'd better call it «The Calotte», suggested another ".

"I think you understood now" said the wisest. "This is the Great Barrier. If we get through, we'll manage to get beyond His World. And Beyond we'll be on our own." This is what I was saying with one of those voices and I could see the Barrier, Dome or Calotte covered in stars, large and small stars, and all we knew is that they were those which tried and didn't succeed. And the leader gave the attack signal...