Everything You Know Is Wrong

Chapter 18 - Deus Machina X

Whatever. It was getting harder and harder to care about that. The universe was an asshole.

Felix reached the end of a long corridor and mentally commanded the door to open in front of him without slowing his stride. Finally he was in the computronium core.

It was a great circular room fifteen meters tall made of ancient stones cut with a laser's precision. A the center of it was a vantablank sphere so dark it appeared to be two dimensional. It hung in place in the air attached to nothing and crackled with power.

Felix began to reach out to the computronium core with his mind, but then his senses were snapped back to awareness of his own body. He saw something out of the corner of his eye. Some kind of movement.

Felix began to move his head back and forth, keeping an eye out for whatever it was that he saw. When he looked left the thing lurking on his left struck.

It was him, another Felix. Another goddamn Felix. This one was haggard malnourished, with the least healthy looking beard Felix had ever seen. He looked like some kind of crazed hermit. He was armed with a small knife, but that still but him at the advantage against Felix's nothing.

He swung wildly with the knife, screaming the whole time, but luckily this hermit Felix didn't seem to be any better a knife-fighter than Felix was. He missed every swipe by a large margin.

"Hey, wait," said Felix. "It's me. I'm you. I'm another Felix."

"I know!" yelled the hermit Felix, and he continued to wave his knife around like a gymnast's ribbon.

Felix edged his way around the black sphere to keep away from the hermit, but the hermit just kept advancing on him and attacking the empty air with his knife.

"I'm just here to fix the God Machine or whatever," continued Felix.

"I know!" yelled the hermit.

"Then why are you trying to kill me?" asked Felix, continuing to back away from the knife.

"Who do you think sabotaged it in the first place?" asked the hermit.

"That's crazy!" said Felix. "You know you're going to destroy the whole universe doing that right?"

"Yes that's the point!" screamed the hermit, advancing faster than he had before and still wildly swinging the knife. "That's the point! I need to end it! I need to end the dream. You'll thank me when we're both the same butterfly."

Felix kept backing up but he tripped over his own feet and fell backwards. The hermit was on him, jamming the knife into his head. The knife caught Felix in the eye before he was able to push the hermit off him, screaming the whole time.

The two Felixes tumbled, one over the other, two times before they settled with the hermit Felix on top. He had impaled himself on his own knife and was only able to manage a few twitches before he bled out.

Felix managed to summon the will to push the hermit's body off him before he curled up and began screaming about his eye.

"Oh God this means I become Patch in the future doesn't it?" he lamented out loud.

While Felix was screaming and lashing out in pain, his mind reeling, many of his fractured thoughts were absorbed into the data glands of the God Machine's incredibly bloated autobrains. This translated into the air filters being flushed, a pot of coffee being brewed, and the front door opened.

Pterosaurs spilled in the entrance. Patch made a wild forward swipe intended to drive two of the creatures off, but they knew no fear. The first took the blow and was decapitated, the second used the opening to attack Patch from behind and pieced him straight through with it's beak.

The remaining pterosaurs began to tear Patch apart between themselves.

Felix got up, realized the door was open, and quickly thought it closed. He hoped in vain that it hadn't been open long.

The door slammed shut, pulverizing the pterosaurs who had all been crowded around inside the entrance.

By the time Felix finished re-calibrating the God Machine to "Earth" conditions and made his way back to the entrance, still nursing his eye, the scene was a slaughterhouse. Pieces of bone were joined with large meaty hunks of Patch. Felix was looking at his own mutilated corpse. It instantly made him ill.

Something else made him sick: lying there, in the middle of the gore, was Patch's sword. It was the only way he could get out of here alive. He was going to have to use it.

Felix really hoped he wasn't Patch. Especially now that it looked like he just got Patch torn to shreds by dinosaur skeletons.