Above the hot concrete expanse, Farid and Armando continued their journey at the mercy of the sun. They placed wet shirts on their heads, and sweat was pouring from them in what seemed like forty degrees, made more irritating by the reflective gray surface. As for the tower, it seemed to be one hundred kilometers away.
Armando asked:
"How did you fall here?"
"Honestly, I don't know. I was doing things with some colleagues that they said were a cure for the schizophrenia I was suffering from."
"Schizophrenia?!... Are you a Transcendent?"
"Yes, I think so. They said my consciousness replaced the consciousness of the body's owner."
"These are the symptoms of a Partial Transcendence, specifically Type Four, the complete regression accompanied by hallucination. Do you feel alright now?"
"Honestly, yes."
"Fortunately for you, I am not one of the Primordians who hate the Transcendents and consider them possessed by the demons of the heretics, heheh. Therefore, you must be careful about the information you disclose about yourself, as you are a Transcendent and do not know much about our culture.
Frankly, I expected that. Your way of speaking hints at a different culture.
By the way, what did the Engineers do to your Earth? Because they literally turned Achylia into hell, and with their absolute power, they granted us bodies that don't perish."
"I don't know what you are talking about... Engineers, bodies that don't perish? What do you mean?! What I know is that the Sixth Update is biologically immortal, meaning it does not die due to old age."
"Do you mean that you did not enter hell, and your air did not turn into pus and boiling water? They are omniscient beings, of course they would know your existence wherever you are, and do you mean that they torture us and leave you to enjoy yourselves?
And wait, the Sixth Update?!
This update did not appear, or did it appear after I fell here six years ago?!"
"No, not just six years. According to my acquaintances, it has been about one thousand years since my resurrection date."
Farid saw the confusion on Armando's face, which had become clearer than before...
"A-A-Are you saying that humanity won?"
"Maybe. I heard them talk a lot about extinctions. The Third Extinction, the Sixth Extinction..."
"Yes, in our history, there is the Third Extinction. It passed a long time ago, but there is no such thing as the Sixth Extinction. Rather, what we are living is a strange thing we call the End of Death, and I am a victim of one of the experiments practiced by the Gods, as it turned out that even the omniscient beings are not omniscient... And there is a place they know nothing about, and I believe it is this place."
"Wait, wait. I heard about something called the Blind Spot of Divinity. Are we in it now?"
"I don't know what that is, but the precise way I entered here is that I succeeded in killing myself, I think, from that state of immortality, but I don't think it's a coincidence. I mean, they are omniscient beings who allowed me to die somehow."
Farid fell silent and stared at the tower and said:
"I don't understand what you are saying, but we have been walking for several hours, and we don't seem to be getting closer to that tower. Let's set up a tent. The sun has given me a headache and skin burns."
They set up the tent. Farid noticed that Armando's features had become clearer. Then Farid began analyzing the situation, saying:
"The heat here is suffocating, and the night must be harsher."
"I think this place, like the previous place, is connected to consciousness somehow."
"Connected to consciousness...
Hmmm, wait a moment. You said this place is connected to consciousness, and you said you made a mistake, or rather, a contradiction in the existing system. I also suspect that I made a mistake while programming my mind..."
Farid remembered Lusihar, who was mocking delta sigma and the idea that the wrong code simply doesn't work, then continued:
"...I think we are in the place where impossible probabilities fall. It is something similar to Hugh Everett's theory in quantum mechanics about the collapse of the wave function and the realization of its probabilities in parallel universes.
[Farid got excited]
Wait, everything is clear. The cure that delta sigma tried to heal me with fundamentally required that no one look at it. We are the measuring device that collapses the probability wave... In your case, I think it is a state of Quantum Immortality. The Gods, as you claim, kept you immortal while preserving your existence within Sarmad, and thus you always survived. Therefore, they must have placed a dead end to your immortality in all timelines, so you became a Dead Immortal, and this is a contradiction and an impossible-to-realize probability in the world, so you fell here."
Armando replied:
"I literally didn't understand anything. Ease up on that strange tone, and who is this delta sigma?"
"Honestly, even I don't know if my analysis is correct or not."
Armando said:
"That doesn't matter. How do we get out of here? We have moved from bad to worse."
"I think we should—I mean, I should not look at that tower, for example."
"Try it."
After resting for some time, they continued their way, and Farid blindfolded himself and felt his way with his aura.
Every few kilometers, he would remove the blindfold to see if he was still on the right path, and he was indeed getting closer, although often he would find the tower in a random place and be forced to change his path, but the important thing was that he was getting closer, even though the tower sometimes appeared behind them.
Their walking continued throughout the day, a day in which the sun seemed stuck in the middle of the sky, but Farid expected that there was a night, for if this sun had been like this since eternity, the surface would have melted, and the air would have become boiling, and since the day's temperature seemed to be fifty degrees, Armando's aura protected them from direct exposure to the sun, and it seemed that even at night, the temperature dropped below zero.
The reflective concrete surface increased their suffering, but that didn't matter. They reached the tower, which actually moved according to the speed of their approach to it. Farid closed his eyes, Armando turned off his aura, and they walked toward it until they felt the surface become metallic and the temperature rose, exactly as if they were entering an oven.
Armando opened his eyes, which were a powdery blue color, and his complexion became clearer despite his redness due to the heat. His smooth black hair became longer, and he said:
"Finally, I see colors,"
then he pulled the thread with which he had sewn his scalp.
The open elevator contained a concrete space with one button on which the number four was written. Farid pressed it quickly, and the door closed, and the elevator began ascending. Armando was surprised by the movement but regained his balance.
The elevator began to increase its speed of ascent. Both of them began to feel the heaviness of the elevator's acceleration. Their feet could no longer support them, so they lay down on the floor. Every second that passed, the elevator accelerated. Their blood, due to the elevator's acceleration, began to drain downward. They began to develop blurred vision in preparation for losing consciousness. They lost consciousness but quickly regained it. The elevator was still ascending and accelerating, but this time they felt weightlessness. Armando felt tense from floating. He tried to grab the elevator door and open it forcefully. Farid prevented him, saying:
"Let's wait a little. If we are really in space, opening this door will kill us."
After a minute, they both felt that their speed was more than necessary. Sound was no longer audible. The light inside the elevator itself began to distort and stretch as if it had become focused downward, as if it had become a laser beam and kidnapped all the light around it until everything went out. Both of them felt the interruption of their existence for a fraction of a second.
The elevator slowed down until it stopped, and the door opened.
Air-conditioned office halls with some papers scattered on the floor. They reached a slightly wider hall full of windows that overlooked something that looked like a sky overcast with white clouds that reflected the light inside. Farid tried to break them but to no avail. They continued their journey. Hours passed, and there was no hope, only office rooms and random useless things thrown on the floor.
Armando suddenly decided to dig the floor. He took out the ax he had obtained from the mall and began digging. Farid found no alternative, so he helped him with that until the ax penetrated the floor, and they widened the hole, only to find themselves looking at themselves from above. They widened the hole more and saw those copies extending to infinity. Farid looked up and found the same hole and Armando looking at him... Literally, they were all identical copies. In fact, they were not copies; they were a somehow distorted perspective.
Armando put his head in. Literally the same room. Armando got excited and jumped inside the hole. Farid tried to stop him.
But he did it, and when his feet landed on the floor next to Farid, he said:
"I just wanted to test what it would be like. Nothing happened. This is just me. It must be some optical illusion."
His voice was repeating in an infinite synchronization between all the copies below and above, as if they were speaking with one voice.
Farid said:
"It seems this is not a solution. Let's continue walking. Maybe we will find hints."
They continued walking for a period of time without a goal and between the corridors,
until they heard a sound similar to a little girl crying. They tried to approach and eavesdrop from the door and found a woman taller than them staring at something written on the wall and crying. Her skin was a color between bluish silver and long black hair, and above her head, eight overlapping wings arranged like a wind turbine. Her shape reminded Farid of delta sigma. She turned her head to look at them. She had white eyes and a black cracked mouth. She began walking toward them with a fixed gaze. Farid pulled Armando, but the rope pierced his stomach, and Armando fell. He was gone.
Farid's mind convulsed, and he rushed away, screaming and hitting the walls, and behind him, the ghost or monster was running and screaming with a sound like millions of saws... No place to hide, and she was right behind him. Then Farid went through the door. He did not want to run in the direction of the stairs leading up because that would slow him down, and he hid beside the entrance. She jumped through the wall, destroying it, and her flesh rushed backward, sticking it to the wall and reforming into her shape. She smiled, and her face opened up as her mouth opened and folded outward with the opening of a row of spiked teeth. This sight filled Farid with disgust to the extent that he felt dizzy. Then, suddenly, she returned to normal and left him. She continued to stare at him and looked at his arm and foot, then left in the direction of the stairs and began sinking into the ground. Before disappearing, she turned to him and said in a deep, unnatural voice:
"Madness is approaching."
The scene was strange. Farid rushed away in the direction he came from until he got tired. He tried to return, but everything—everything had changed. The place was constantly changing. Directions were meaningless. Maps were meaningless. Farid felt he had made the biggest mistake of his life.
< "Was Armando just an illusion?!
No, impossible. If he was an illusion, how did we get out of that mall?" >
He continued his journey, fleeing from the sounds, even though most of them were human voices. He walked for hours that turned into days, and nothing changed. Food was about to run out, but he clung to life. Armando spent years looking for a solution on one of the floors, but that floor, where the latter was, had food and water, unlike this place—random rooms that were constantly changing with infinite extensions.
But finally, Farid found something different. It was a sign placed oddly against the nature of the place. It was written in English: EXIT. Something strange for this place. Farid did not miss the opportunity and followed it, corridor after corridor. He found that sign and followed it. He felt like he was going in circles, but he didn't care. The place was illogical. Even if he was going in circles between the rooms, the rooms were changing, but these signs were arranged one after the other. Some corridors did not have that sign, so he did not cross them. He trusted those corridors and walked in them for a distance he felt was ten kilometers. He was about to give up, but he continued despite the strangeness until he found the last door—an opening in the wall with a number written above it:
13 358 334
These openings extended for a distance whose end he did not perceive. The distance between the opening and the next one was three meters. The numbers above the openings were counting down. Farid felt curious. Signs and numbers in the language of planet Earth. This must be an exit to the real world at number one or zero.
Farid took out his notebook and began calculating. He multiplied the number above the first door by the distance between the opening and the next one, which seemed to be 3 meters, without calculating the thickness of the white wall, which was 15 centimeters. The result was
40,075,002 meters.
Farid's eyes were fixed. It was the circumference of planet Earth itself.
He continued calculating, converting that number to kilometers and dividing it by the walking speed of 5 kilometers per hour. The result was
8,015 hours. He subtracted the total sleep hours, 4 hours, and rest hours, 5 hours. The result was 171 hours of walking per day with his body adapted to the Sarmad environment. He divided the number of hours by the number of his walking hours per day. The result was 46 days.
Out of curiosity, he did the same with Earth's data, assuming a good sleep of 8 hours and rest of 3 hours. He would have to walk a full 616 days and 7 hours on the following day, which is one year, eight months, twelve days, and seven hours.
He thought for a moment before entering, as he was lost in any case, and his food was only enough for two days, but no matter how much he racked his brain, there was no alternative.
He advanced and entered the first opening. He felt a change and looked behind him. He found it had turned into a solid wall. He looked to the right and left. The place was dark. Curiosity overwhelmed him, and he chose the right. He plunged into its darkness until he saw the exit. It only led him back to the mazes.
He decided to return and took the left path of the openings whose numbers had not changed. The same thing only led him back to the mazes. He returned to the organized openings that seemed to extend infinitely. He began moving through them, and they closed behind him.
He quickly cut one hundred. But this was just an illusion. The numbers, the higher they went, the slower their acceleration became.
When he reached a point, he walked to the right, then to check the place, and found the same office mazes, and of course, whenever his perception was interrupted, their design changed, but this time was different. Plants and flowers grew on the ground densely, and the scene was brighter with sounds that resembled distant bird chirps. Farid immediately felt that it was a trap and returned to the wall openings, which were stable, and even the interruption of his consciousness did not change their shape.
Hours passed. On his way, he encountered transparent bodies in the shapes of humans and clothes similar to Earth clothes, and they were not moving. Were they ghosts? Hallucinations? He did not know. He barely maintained his composure. The path ahead of him was clear. He passed beside them. They were like a body seen only from one side. Wherever he went, they were always facing him. Although he approached them at a distance of no more than two meters, they did not attack. They just stood there. He did not know if they were watching him or not. Their faces were transparent and dark to the extent that their expressions could not be discerned, as if they were lost souls in infinity.
Days passed, and the water and food ran out. Death was approaching. He did not know how much his body would endure while the number above the openings was still enormous....
______________________
To be continued in part 2...