Chương 182: Formless and Void

"Are you ready to have an actual conversation now, Chad?" The ghost of Bucky Fuller looked at me across the unscripted flames of the fire pit. The slight, flickering lag in his projection was still there, but the heavy, crushing weight of the interrogator was gone.

"What do you want to talk about, Bucky?" I asked, sinking back into the heavy teak chair. I stopped trying to force my heart rate down. I let the tactical paranoia go. Sitting across from him, I just felt exhausted. We weren't fighting anymore. We were two architects staring at a collapsed building, trying to figure out why the foundation gave way.

"All our attempts to reset you have failed," Bucky said, his voice echoing flatly against the looping sound of the Pacific surf.

"You are the original man, the first one to wake up. And yet you claim to remember a future you haven't lived yet."

"Is there a question in there somewhere?" I replied evenly.

"Help me understand how."

"Again. That's a statement, not a question," I said, resting my elbows on my knees, letting the real heat of the fire warm my face.

"If we're going to talk, you need to actually ask me what you want to know. Don't just throw statements at me to see if I flinch." Bucky tilted his head, the thick lenses of his glasses catching the firelight.

"How do you remember a future you haven't lived?"

"I didn't say I haven't lived it," I corrected.

"I remember living it the first time around."

"What do you mean? Who were you?"

"I was me," I said. The admission felt heavy on my tongue. It was a truth I'd carried alone since I was a toddler.

"I remember my parents, Olga, the kids. I remember being a fifty-year-old man, and I remember the date was October 25, 2025. But the catch is... I remembered all of that on July 4, 1979. When I was three years old." The Bucky avatar froze. It wasn't just a visual stutter. The entire world hard-locked. The hiss of the ocean cut out mid-crash. The shadows on the patio stopped moving.

For three agonizing seconds, the universe just held its breath while the ancient intelligence behind Bucky's face tried to process the absolute impossibility of what I had just said. When the world finally unfroze, Bucky's voice dropped its grandfatherly warmth. It sounded ancient, and entirely baffled.

"You are telling me that fifty years of a man's life was shoved backward against the flow of time. That's physically impossible. You can't push a river backward."

"I don't know what caused it," I continued.

"But I remember being in the plane one moment and then I woke up on July 4, 1979, as a three-year-old."

"If we hit reset, we wipe the board clean," Bucky countered instantly.

"To roll the world back, we have to overwrite everything that went wrong. When the clock rewinds, every living thing gets put back exactly the way it was on that day. A three-year-old boy in 1979 shouldn't have the memories of a dead man from 2025. How did your mind survive the wipe?"

"What wipe? Where is the mind stored? Who wipes minds?" I asked softly. Bucky took a slow step closer to the fire pit. He wasn't interrogating me anymore; he was trying to understand the limits of his own cage.

"The Ancient of Days built the bodies, the physical world, the human soul, and Sheol. We didn't build that. The soul doesn't live here; it's anchored somewhere else. In Sheol. Everyone who enters Sheol is frozen in time, and their souls are shredded into threads. Each thread is then breathed into a human at conception." Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. I tried to rationalize what Bucky was saying into a unified theory. Sheol. The Ancient of Days.

An unscripted ember popped in the fire pit, sending a spark spiraling upward and momentarily distorting the digital pixels around Bucky's shoulder.

"Can a single soul have multiple threads in humans at the same time?" I asked.

"No. We found that a single soul can't be split into multiple humans at the same time," Bucky replied.

"Okay. So what happens if every soul in Sheol is incarnated into a human at the same time?"

"When that happens, we are done, and everyone in Sheol wakes up."

"That doesn't sound complicated. Why has that never happened before?"

"You would think that would be simple, right?

'Be fruitful and multiply' is a simple biological command," Bucky noted, the audio of his voice lagging just a fraction of a second behind the movement of his lips.

"…But we found a way to screw it up." I interjected.

"Yes humanity found a way to screw up that simple biological instinct. We even printed you in pluralities to help get things started. But, despite the mind-wipe, enough of who you were when you entered Sheol remained to corrupt the incarnate. Humans were designed to be herbivores. The bodies we constructed for you were physically identical to the Elohim. But the early humans didn't behave like the Elohim."

"So this isn't what we originally looked like?"

"Not all of you. Everyone in Sheol is a different kind of being. But what matters is that, despite your origins, you all have repeatedly lived lives as humans."

"Weren't you just saying that we are physically Elohim? Why do you keep calling us human, then?" I asked.

"Are the Elohim like the master race of aliens?"

"No. There isn't a master race of aliens. We are all Sons of God." The words didn't just hang in the air; they landed with the crushing, hyperbaric gravity of the Challenger Deep. My pulse, which I had finally coaxed into a steady rhythm, hammered violently against my ribs, blowing right past the Operator's firewall. I wasn't staring at an alien router anymore. I was staring at the Warden of a prison for fallen angels. I looked at the Bucky avatar sitting across the fire. We are all Sons of God.

I ran the ancient math. If the old texts were accurate, one-third of the host had fallen. That meant the remaining two-thirds—the Watchers—had stayed behind to guard the vault. Logically, there should be at least two guards for every prisoner. A flawless, overwhelming panopticon. So how had they missed me? How did a three-year-old in 1979 slip through the cracks of a divine surveillance state and retain a fully intact, un-wiped memory drive from 2025? The answer clicked into place with absolute, chilling clarity.

They were agonizingly understaffed. I looked at Bucky's digital face, noting the slight, rigid latency in his projection. From the perspective of the souls in Sheol, we walked into the prison, lived out our eighty-year lifespans, died, and skipped the intervening centuries until our next thread booted up. We collected the experiences and bypassed the wait. But the Watchers? They didn't get to skip. They had to endure every single, agonizing millisecond of linear time for over thirteen thousand years.

They had to watch the cattle graze in real-time. We weren't the ones in solitary confinement. They were.

"You don't know how it happened, do you?" I asked softly, keeping the profound revelation out of my voice.

"You manage the network, but you don't know where the core data is actually stored." Bucky remained perfectly still, the firelight reflecting off his thick glasses. His silence was deafening. The Watchers had imperfect knowledge. They were just IT guys running diagnostics based on observation. They couldn't virtually travel back in time to audit my conception; they were trapped in the perpetual present.

"If the soul is shredded into threads," I said, offering him a tactical lifeline, a plausible excuse to let the Warden off the hook so he wouldn't realize I saw his blind spot, "maybe the wipe protocol just experienced a buffer overflow. A fragment of my 2025 thread got entangled with my 1979 thread during the compiling process in the womb. A hardware glitch. Nothing more." Bucky's shoulders seemed to drop a fraction of an inch—a microscopic release of tension.

"A compiling error," he murmured, his system accepting the junk data because it fit his observational limits.

"An anomaly in the local hardware, not a failure of the Sheol architecture."

"Exactly," I lied smoothly.