Chương 4: 3-New Times Are Coming

A long, long time ago"I am so very sorry to disturb you, Professor Arimel," Ahura said, fidgeting nervously.

"I did not know what else to do." He had found his girlfriend unconscious in their apartment. She lay on the floor as if she had just had a seizure. He tried to activate the Essence Channel in her apartment to call emergency services, but she suddenly woke up and croaked a hoarse "No!"

"What happened, Dawn? Are you feeling alright? Can you talk?" Ahura asked, kneeling beside her.

"Call Arimel. Tell him something has happened; he is the only one who can make sense of this," she croaked. Then she fainted again. Ahura called him. Arimel knew something significant had happened as soon as he answered. He was on his way to the apartment in less than ten seconds, leaving Ahura with a comatose girlfriend and a weird polyhedron that seemed almost to glare at him.

"Dawn, what have you done?" Ahura asked, holding Dawn's unresponsive hand.

"You were always the sensible one." Twenty minutes later, Arimel was standing beside Dawn's unconscious body.

"And she was holding this?" the professor asked, studying the weird polyhedron in her hands.

"Yes, do you know what it is? Have you seen it before?" Ahura asked him.

"I have no idea," Arimel answered in his quiet, low voice.

"I can tell you it does not obey the laws of reality. It displays runes that can't be memorized. At first, I thought it was playing with my memory. It is not. It is changing the immediate past. I tried copying some of the runes on paper, and it changed what I wrote into scribbles."

"I wonder why she called for me? Your girlfriend does not like me," Arimel told Ahura.

"She does not even bother to hide it."

"I called you because you were right all the time," Dawn answered weakly from the couch. She was awake again.

"Those runes…the only explanation is reality rewriting, much as you have always postulated eidocytes can do. You are also the only member of the University with a mind flexible enough to listen to my story without having me committed."

"Thank you," Arimel smiled.

"I will take that as a compliment." Arimel's calm demeanor did a lot to soothe Ahura's anxiety. It did not last. As soon as Dawn finished her tale about having been visited by an angel, he could not help but wonder again if she had been through some sort of psychotic break.

"I understand your desire to keep this private… it is…quite a tale," Arimel answered thoughtfully.

"But you have one object that clearly defies everything we know about Physics and Eidotics," he paused for a few seconds, "I am inclined to believe you."

"It is more than that, Professor Arimel," Dawn went on.

"When I touched the item… it changed me. I am not the same as before."

"There is nothing unusual about you, Dawn," Ahura tried to reassure her.

"It is not an outward change. This blue screen has been blocking my vision since I woke up. I have just found out I can dispel it and summon it back at will."

"A screen? What does it say?" asked Arimel, his eyes lighting up. Dawn described it. Rank 1 (00%) Each rank will add 20% to your base potential. If the rank is a multiple of 10, it will be considered your new base potential. Gift: Learning 1 Gift: System Vector 1 (acquired through Alpha). Can be used once per day to activate another sentient being.

"It looks like the character creation screen of one of those dumb multi-games my idiot boyfriend plays on the Essence Net."

"Yes," conceded Arimel.

"A coarse and unrefined one. It is the skeleton of a character creation system."

"What do you mean?" asked a bewildered Dawn.

"It does not even have its own stat system. Uses your potential as a template. A physically gifted but intellectually limited person at rank 20 would always have more strength than intelligence, even if both went up," Arimel explained.

"And what about the multiples of ten?" asked Ahura.

"I think it is an attempt to combine arithmetic and exponential progression. Using this system, the speed at which stats grew would accelerate each time the character hit 10, 20, and so on…"

"How do you know so much about all this?" Dawn asked Arimel.

"Oh, your idiot boyfriend did not tell you?" Arimel looked at her in surprise.

"I am the idiot guildmaster of his idiot guild in that idiot game. I am also an idiot out of work hours, you know?" This time, it was Dawn's turn to blush furiously.

"Back to the screen we go," Arimel announced.

"Have you noticed any increase in your physique or mind? Any new abilities?"

"No. I feel pretty much the same as always," Dawn confirmed.

"I am supposed to 'activate' others, whatever that means."

"We are going to find out now, because you are going to try it on me," Arimel told her.

"What? No! We don't know if it is safe. I could end up killing you." Dawn protested.

"Okay, do it on Ahura then, he is younger and healthier," Arimel countered. Dawn paled.

"See? Do it on me. I am volunteering," Arimel smiled at her.

"This is the adventure of a lifetime. Do not keep me out of it, please. We need answers." Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Dawn hesitated for an instant, then she gently touched Arimel's wrinkled face. Ahura knew her well—she clearly expected nothing to happen. Arimel gave a strangled cry and fell on the floor, convulsing.

"It is working!" Ahura exclaimed.

"Oh, my god, Dawn, you can activate people!"

"Are you out of your mind, Ahura? Look at him, he is having a bloody seizure!" screamed Dawn. They both stared, transfixed, at Arimel's spasming body. He stopped convulsing after ten seconds. He sighed, opened his eyes, and tried slowly to stand up, swaying on his feet. For some reason, the process did not seem to affect him as much as it had affected Dawn.

"It worked," he weakly said.

"I can summon the screen. It is similar to yours."

"I know," Dawn answered.

"I can see it, too. I am summoning mine too. Can you see it?" Arimel's sudden gasp indicated he could. That left poor Ahura staring at empty air, while his two colleagues compared their screens.

"You have only a single gift, and it is different from mine," Dawn said, looking in wonder at the space where Arimel's screen ought to be floating. She faced Ahura, suddenly realizing he could see nothing.

"His gift is called Vision," she explained.

"I do not feel any different. I think these powers are inert; we must do something to activate them, but I have not the slightest idea of what," Arimel confessed.

"Your instincts were good," he told Dawn.

"We must keep this a secret, at least until we know what we are talking about."

"We can't keep the people from knowing, Professor," Dawn protested.

"Of course not, that is not my intention. But if we make this public, you and I are going to stop being investigators and become guinea pigs. Think about this. We are probably the three finest minds in the University. I can get access to almost unlimited funds," Arimel paused for breath.

"This was fated to happen. We must unravel the mystery and give the results to the world." Ahura saw a flicker of doubt in his girlfriend's face. She was still not convinced.

"Come on, honey, can you honestly tell me that any other team in this University has a better chance of success than we three? You know he is right," he told her. In the end, she gave in. She was, above all, a scientist and wanted to know the answers. She wanted to be part of the investigation, not its object. She gave in, and in so doing, she slew the world. Three Months Later Another failed attempt, thought Dawn, as she perused the readings from their last experiment.

They had tried everything, absolutely everything, to interact with the bloody Icosahedron, to no avail.

"Whatever we do to that bloody artifact, it undoes it in one second. We have found the proverbial immovable object," she said to Ahura. She was tired and angry. The day after Arimel had been "activated", whatever that meant, she had petitioned for a transfer of departments, shocking all her old coworkers. There were a lot of nasty rumors and speculations, but they had eventually died down.

Ahura, Arimel, and she had spent the last ninety days working eighteen-hour shifts, trying to solve the mystery of the artifact. Their lack of results had eventually begun to tear the young couple down. Not Arimel. The man was like a laser; nothing could dent his focus.

"I am almost fifty years older than you, Dawn. This is my last chance to solve this," he had once confided to her. They had investigated not only the Icosahedron, but also themselves. Dawn finally relented and activated Ahura too when it became clear the process was harmless. He had gotten a different gift, Mimic, but the rest of his screen was identical to Arimel's.

They had tried to activate their powers and had done everything they could think of to advance in rank, setting themselves tasks fitting their different gifts. Nothing had worked. All of them remained stuck at 0%"I don't think we are doing anything wrong," Arimel had once told them.

"I think it just lacks an adequate power source." Dawn had learned to respect the man's intuition. He was a genius, not in the colloquial sense of the word, but in the true one: he discovered easy, simple solutions to very complex problems, and these solutions became obvious as soon as they were explained. But nobody had thought of them before. His critics often claimed that his discovery of eidocytes was a mere fluke. Dawn knew better now; luck had played a part, but any other would have missed the clues.

Arimel not only knew when and where to look—he also knew how. So it was no surprise to her when Arimel called them both later that morning and asked them to sit down. Another new angle. A new idea that would use all their time for the next three weeks. A new disappointment. God, she hated this man.

"I think I have solved it," he said, looking more relieved than happy. Dawn mentally upgraded her opinion of him several notches.

"How?" she asked, unable to contain her excitement. How could the man be so bloody calm?

"The trick is not studying the artifact directly, but the effect it has on its environment," he started. Dawn quickly interrupted him, "But we have done that. We have studied it from every angle. The thing is as inert as a brick. It does nothing."

"There is something we missed. Essence waves. It is emitting an Essence signal, much as eidocytes do," Arimel explained. There it was. The obvious, easy solution no one had seen before. Arimel's trademark.

"That is a significant finding, sir," Dawn answered with unfeigned respect.

"But I don't think it will help us. Essence waves are only good for cataloging eidocytes."

"Sometimes, to see the path, you have to begin at the end," Arimel answered cryptically. He did like to play the eccentric genius, now and again.

"We can identify eidocytes because the Essence waves they emit depend on their genetic structure. Each different strain affects the ether in a specific way."

"So, I said to myself," he said, showing a test tube dramatically, "why not use my advanced strain-breeding equipment to reverse-engineer a strain that matches the same Essence pattern the Icosahedron is emitting?"

"Voilà!" he said, holding the tube. It was empty. Arimel gasped.

"It was filled with culture medium ten minutes ago. It is hermetically sealed. This is impossible!"

"I think we left the impossible behind ninety days ago, sir," Ahura answered.

"Are you aware what you have done, you imbecile?" Dawn finally snapped.

"If whatever you created is not inside your bloody tube, it is out there. In the air! Replicating itself! You have broken all the Eidotics security protocols," she said furiously as she slammed the door on her way out.

"I know that, Dawn," Arimel answered, in a soft, stricken voice, even though she could no longer hear him.

"I wrote those protocols." That night, Dawn and Ahura lay embraced in bed.

"I am having second thoughts about all this," Ahura confessed.

"Welcome to the club. I think Arimel is afraid, too, but he will not admit it," Dawn answered, cradling his head on her chest.

"What do you think has happened to the eidocytes in that test tube?" Ahura looked her in the eyes as he asked this.

"I think Arimel was right all along. Eidocytes can exist in more than one dimension simultaneously. At least the ones he has created. I think that is the way they broke free from the tube," she answered.

"We have released them in the atmosphere."

"Let's try to sleep," she sighed.

"It is later than I expected. This damned watch you gave me for my birthday is not working anymore."

"Really?" Ahura frowned.

"That thing syncs to atomic time and runs on triple-redundant Essence shielding. It's not supposed to ever be wrong." They both went to sleep, unaware that they had just missed the first omen of the apocalypse. Five minutes later, they missed the second one. Rank 1 (00%) → Rank 1 (03%)