Ch 3

It hadn't been long since Melmat had murdered his master. Though he had not been a rich man, the auction of his possessions and sale of his home had yielded a little over five hundred thousand dollars. A well written suicide note, along with a fruitless man hunt had satisfied the police, leaving him without any looming threats from the legal system. If he so desired, he could take the money and run, washing his hands of this whole dirty business. His desires, however, had crystallized and become invincible over fifteen years ago. He hadn't abandoned his college ambitions, broken Suzana's heart and knocked his father out cold in front of his sobbing mother for a paltry half a million dollars. Melmat wanted finish what they had started.

He sat in a motel six room in a functionally nameless town in Nevada. The carpet was green with a golden line pattern running through it, the sheets of the bed he sat on were a golden tan, and the walls were yellow. Beside him was a nightstand with a functional lamp. His unit had a refrigerator, an oven and a large flat screen across from his bed. All in all, Melmat felt that for a hotel in the middle of nowhere, it was unusually large and luxurious.

In the room floated a violet sphere, glowing with neon light, like a miniature sun. It rotated lazily in place, textured with slow plasma arcs and flares, ready to respond to the slightest desire. Without warning, someone began knocking on the door.

“Housekeeping,” the woman said.

Melmat rose from his thoughts and opened the door, letting the woman inside. “I'm afraid there isn't much for you today, just a little trash and some towels.

She smiled at him “You make my job easy,” she said, as she walked through the violet sun, oblivious to its presence. She gathered the damp towels and took the garbage bag that had been set near the front door. “You've been staying here for a while,” She said, clearly trying to kill some time and possibly get him to ask her out “What brings you out to No-Hope Nevada?”

“I thought it was Hope, Nevada,” Melmat said, giving her a friendly smile and emphasizing the pause between the town and state.

“No Hope here, partner,” she said, and winked at him. Melmat, a naturally focused man, hadn't needed to remember that his housekeeper was exceptionally attractive, until this very moment.

“Seems like there's some Hope for me,” Melmat said, smile widening. Inside of his mind, he felt something like what happens when you get dunked into an ice bath, but without any pain or discomfort. The attempted coup by his reproductive system was crushed before it even managed to stand up.

“Stay on point, Melmat. We've got a lot of decisions to make,” The violet orb said in a female voice, pulsing with light at each word.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” he said, outwardly ignoring his intangible companion.

She smiled back, took the trash and left. Melmat smiled and nodded, shutting the door behind her as she left. Once the door was closed, the smile lingered, then went slack, leaving his face expressionless once again.

“Librorum,” he said aloud, and the sphere floated silently to rest a little behind his left shoulder.

“I am at your disposal, Melmat,” The voice was feminine, cool and smooth.

“Recall the mountain after the sacrifice,” The orb flared for a moment, then Melmat's surroundings fell away in a downward blur that gave him the sickening sense of vertigo. He was surrounded by a pop of light, like a camera flash, then he was fully immersed in the memory like a virtual reality movie. He looked at himself, standing next to the old ford. He looked at the barren desert, then up at the queer, alien patch of sky above the mountain. No, his eyes hadn't been playing tricks on him. That they had warped the space in the area was without question. He stared at the sky, which looped back to the beginning when his past self turned away from the mountain and got into the old car and continued to play on repeat. It reminded him of the rainbow sheen of an oil spill on water. Melmat watched the sky loop several times before pulling himself from the memory.

“Relay the plan to me, Librorum.”

She made a throaty, sultry purr “I'd think you would know the plan by now. Depending on how quickly Melchsee is able to learn fine levels of control, you have a hard limit of two years before you discover the dimensional rift. That's going to take some serious legwork if you want it to look legitimate.”

“She should have built some very sophisticated defenses,” she continued “by the time you get there. You'll want to build as much infrastructure around the rift as possible, and delay official governmental and military discovery as long as is plausible. That means buying the desert and the mountain and,” she paused “You'll need to establish your own territory under your complete control. Finally, you'll need to recruit and train on a large scale. If our projections were anything close to accurate, we need bodies, and a lot of them.”

“You left out college.”

“I experience your every thought, and you've already been obsessing about it. Would you like me to examine the issue again?”

“Please.”

“Your education in high psychology, the letter of recommendation from The Master,” her words had implied capitalization, “and that little toy radio he had you build should be enough to get you into the college you determine most ideal.” She paused, and her next words had an implied smirk “And if it's not, you've got a little more than four hundred and ninety thousand notes of worthless paper to bribe anyone who needs a little encouragement to get the ball rolling.”

“Why are we doing this again?”

“The Master insisted that you needed to make some waves in the academic world. It's better to be the forerunner in a budding field of research than a lone crackpot with wild theories about magic and monsters.”

Melmat grunted. He did indeed know every detail of the plan, which made the fact that his master had not contacted him yet even more troubling. Melmat pulled his laptop from one of the suitcases at the foot of the bed. It was a new laptop, thick and heavy with the most hardware one could buy on the market, and some which could only be bartered for with secretive individuals connected with unknown, shadowy programs and powers.

It powered on automatically as he unlocked and opened it, a blank white screen with a text box in the center of it, prompting him for a password. There was a five second window in which the password could be entered, after that the computer would shut down and have to be dissembled and reassembled in a specific way in order to turn it back on again. He quickly typed, a short session of furious clacking against the keyboard, and was greeted by his wallpaper, a four leaf clover in the middle of a bright road, leading to a shining light with an infinity symbol inside of it; an image which Melmat had replicated from a vision. He tapped the screen and opened a program with the icon of a blue ball, the window which appeared was gray and spartan, displaying only a small interactive map of his location, along with several sliders and checkboxes off to the side. It had the appearance of something created in the early days of computers, ancient and outdated; like something the Federal Government would use. Looking at it threatened to overwhelm him with exhaustion.

“Librorum, do you mind taking care of this for me? Create a timelapse video from the beginning, I want to see if anything sticks out to me.”

Melmat drifted into his mind, an experience much like the sensation of suddenly falling when lying in bed, and Librorum took control of his body. The last thing he saw of the material universe, was his own body hunched over the computer, working. Of all the powers and abilities he'd acquired in his training, this was still one of his favorites.

Melmat fell and immersed himself in a well designed lucid dream. His mental sanctuary, a futuristic castle fortress, flew high above sunlit clouds and distant green fields. He sat on a lawn of soft moss, cross legged, examining the bright flags emblazoned with the symbols of the various colleges he had to consider. As he examined them, his eyes continued to wander to a pile of neatly folded and stacked flags, the discard pile. At the very bottom, he saw the college and life he had left behind years and years ago. It would take a miracle to convince him to go back, and face the mess he had made so long ago.

“Master?” Librorum appeared before him, a mahogany red leather bound book as large as a table. The book opened, and on the thick white pages a video of a weather map was playing. There was a green circle around the town of Hope. Far in the distance, down a road broken to near un-usability and in the desert, was a small mountain range. A slowly expanding blue circle was coming from somewhere near the peak, along with periodic patches of blue across the map, like desert clouds, quickly forming and dispersing.

Melmat's heart began beating quickly as the patches formed more frequently and the circle around the mountain continued to grow. Librorum closed.

“I've analyzed it with all our tools. It's mana,” she said, then vanished. “We're going to have a little less time than we thought,” she said, her voice coming from the recently vacated location.

Melmat rubbed his chin, then allowed himself to rise back through his mind, re-entering his body. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He took out a poloroid folded down the middle, a beautiful girl with her arms around a much younger Melmat, MIT's campus in the background.

“Well, if you want to make some waves,” he said.

She wouldn't be there, he knew. She couldn't be, not after ten years.