The Post-Humans (Book 1): The League (8 page)

She covered her face with her hands.

Athan tipped his head back and rubbed at his rough chin. Thinking about how to respond sensitively.

“Well that’s an intrigue and a half,” he said tactlessly.

The environment hadn’t changed.

She wasn’t free yet.

“Then why are we here?” he asked, almost at a loss. He was growing impatient again. Every step closer felt like a small victory, but the game went on and he needed to keep playing.

I hate games. Why do human minds have to be a mish-mash composition of every board game I ever sucked at…

“Because twelve years later I married him after they had a divorce.” She uncovered her eyes. “And he’s a bastard and my sister won’t speak to me.”

Athan cringed.
Like sands through the hour glass…

“And…it’s all because I was a selfish little girl that never grew up.” She closed her eyes and tears rolled down her cheeks.

Suddenly there was stillness.

The dripping of pipes stopped.

And then things began to disappear.

At last.

As she faded away and the world became a void once again he noticed a door. There was a ripple in the mindscape, like a vacuum.

Someone had been watching the whole situation like a TV drama, drawing from it, feeding.

Athan became uneasy.

He hated being watched.

And the presence had malevolence to it.

This was one of those doors to the deeper plane, a world within a world within a world, and it felt like it was unhealthy, like a parasite.

Athan tightened his black tie as he decided what to do.

He needed to know what it was that made him feel so uncomfortable, he wanted to understand why it made him feel the way it did.

Athan drifted towards the ripple in the black mindscape, ready to recoil quickly if he needed to. It was like sliding into water, submerging your face in a pool with a held breath.

It was cool to the touch.

As he pushed himself through and felt a tingle pass over his skin like goose bumps and a pressure like deep water.

It reminded him of when he was thirteen and swimming competitively for his year level at school. After winning a race he felt invincible and decided he would swim to the bottom of the diving pool. It was five metres deep, not much to a teenager, so he pulled himself deeper and deeper, but it was always out of reach, just that little bit too far. Finally he was within an arm’s length of it and it felt like someone was squeezing his head with their fingers in his ears.

It was the pressure. It was unbearable, and he had to give up and burst back to the surface for a breath.

This was how it felt now, like diving into that pool again, the door felt thick and syrupy, like he was moving in slow motion.

Then the other side was in view.

He beheld a scene of hell.

A greenish glowing sun lit another bony, fleshy landscape, but unlike the empty one he was familiar with, this one was swarming with activity. There was no endless fog concealing the details of this landscape, it was overrun with an endless ocean of crawling things of all shapes and sizes. Many of them stood like men, like soldiers standing at duty in their thousands. Their blank heads reminded him of the faceless figure he saw standing next to the ridge after he freed Mr Li.

Droves of man sized beings with no faces.

He felt the pressure build until it was too much for him and he felt out of breath. He needed to turn around and escape back to the rippled entrance. If he didn’t, he would drown.

The pressure threatened to crush his body.

It was like a dream, the closest thing Athan had had to experiencing the helplessness of a nightmare. The more he fought to retrace his steps, the more he felt like he was drifting toward the Hell World in front of him.

Finally there was a kind of traction.

His hand passed through the goose bump sensation of the doorway, and he summoned all the strength he could to pull the rest of his body through. At last his view of the deeper plane began to fade and shrink, he was now alone in the cold emptiness of Kendra Thompson’s subconscious.

He closed his eyes a moment to recall the horrifying scene.

It was the closest he had come to the deeper plane. It must be some kind of a glitch, some kind of mindscape crossover.

And the creatures?

Surely they were some kind of creation of someone’s mind, or his? Had he discovered his own subconscious? This needed more thought, and he needed to get out and back to the safety of the plane he knew, or the physical plane.

Athan stepped out of a forty-seven year old man having a cigarette in the Ballarat Base Hospital car park.

He took a deep breath of the cool Ballarat air, and said a polite greeting to the smoking man, who had not noticed the man in the suit approach.

Then Athan began marching toward the gate and the street that would take him down to the lake.

He knew that up there, in the hospital ward David Li and Kendra Thompson would wake up from their comas.

Two more patients freed from their internal imprisonment.

Oh, crap…

As if from nowhere, Athan’s crippling headache spread again in his brain.

“Aah,
dammit
. What the hell!” He rubbed at his temples.

This was not the first time he had left a patient with a migraine, but they seemed to be getting worse, and he still had two more patients on the list.

He needed to sit down and have a dim sim and some water with a healthy dose of painkillers before he would be able to tackle number three.

IN THE HIDDEN bunker in Ballarat’s industrial south, Belinda was making a cup of coffee for Brad and herself. She had white with two sugars and Brad had white with a teaspoon of honey.

“I’ll have one,” Athan said from behind her, “white with three, or honey, I’m not fussed, and a pain killer. Make that two.”

Belinda jumped with fright and the milk splashed over her mug and all over the bench.

Athan had used her mind as his conduit to reach Brad.

“Holy crap!” Belinda leant forward over the bench, gripping the edge, facing away from Athan. “You asshole!
Don’t do that!”

She turned and shoved him in the chest.

Athan just smiled apologetically.

“Were you in my head just now? Stay out of there, it makes me feel violated!” she looked more annoyed than frightened. “Brad told me how you disappeared last time! It’s weird, and kinda freaks me out.”

Athan held up his hands defensively.

“Sorry. It’s faster than walking, and I’m always in a hurry,” he lied.

He actually liked frightening people occasionally; it made him feel like he existed on this plane.

Belinda covered her eyes with her hand and tried to calm down.

“What is going on?” Brad’s voice rang out from out in the main room.

“It’s me Brad,” Athan answered as he watched Belinda clumsily make his coffee. Her eyes were dark and vacant, as she tried to make sense of something that should be impossible.

“Here, white with three. I wish you wouldn’t do that to me,” she said.

“Thank you,” Athan said, warming his hands with the hot mug. “I’ll try not to Belinda.”

“Here are some pills for the pain.” She handed him the two tablets. “Why can’t you jump out of his head? He’s probably used to it.”

Athan shook his head. “I can’t use Brad, he’s like me. I don’t know why I can’t, but that’s just the way it is.”

She leaned back on the kitchen bench.

She wasn’t angry anymore; she was just a little annoyed. Athan’s ability was new to her and challenging to comprehend.

“What if I was in the shower or something?” She shook her head. “Are you going to keep visiting us now? Am I going to be your permanent front door to Bradland?”

Athan smiled and shrugged. “Well, you’d just have to dry my clothes again. Also I don’t visit anyone regularly, especially people like me. It’s not safe.”

Belinda nodded toward the main room. “He’s in the lounge watching his TVs. Bring him his coffee, would you?”

“Thank you again, Belinda. And I’m sorry about giving you a fright.”

She waved him off and gave him a slight smile.

“Sleepwalker, old boy! Welcome back! What’s up? I’m sure you wouldn’t make
social
visits.” Brad greeted Athan from the lounge.

He sat in a grey woolen jumper and his brown shoulder length hair was hanging like a curtain over his face as he read.

Athan walked in, and handed him his hot drink. “You can use my name, Brad. The League is all over now.”

“I know, but the nick names are our own.” Brad took the drink and sat on the arm of the lounge. “We chose them before The League was born.”

Athan chuckled and seated himself on the lounge that he had slept on a day before.

“You aren’t going to need a sofa bed or something from now on are you?” Brad asked, joking.

“No.” Athan shook his head. “I never stay anywhere, you know that…”

“I know.” Brad closed his book. “Well, what brought you here this time, old friend, besides the need for more pain killers?”

He asked, obviously trying to remain positive, because he knew that if Athan had paid a visit, it wouldn’t be without a reason.

“I’ve been working for a Doctor from Melbourne, an expert on coma patient research. He came to me when I was in Melbourne. I don’t know how he found me. Apparently he was under the instruction of a department head in the hospital. He told me that there were some coma patients I had to look at.”

Brad closed his book and nodded.

Athan continued. “He gave me a list of four names and brought me to the first person on the list. He was told that I could help these people. What I found was that these patients were trapped in their own minds and couldn’t escape, and that if I discovered the right trigger material for an individual, we may be able to wake them up.”

Brad nodded. “And what did you find?”

Athan took a deep breath. “Well these people had different minds to regular people. I’d never accessed an unconscious person before, but I have learned that they are extraordinary. They create an endless plane that reflects a period of unrest from their early life, depending on what traumas they keep bottled up.”

“How fascinating!” Brad interjected. “Over the last hundred years there have been many different doctors and scholars who have speculated about this.”

“I’ve been visiting these minds and discovering very young versions of the people in question. It’s like we are all children on the inside, children that never got past a point that upset us or confused us. For example I found a fifty year old man at the age of seven hiding in the garden shed from his abusive father, and another boy hiding from the neighbour’s dog because he felt responsible for it being put down.”

“This is remarkable. Very detailed.” Brad stared off into space as he contemplated. “These scenarios sound very generic as well. They seem to be believable and likely.”

Athan nodded, satisfied that Brad was following. “I get an idea of how they work from the different objects or environments that are present. I have to remember my childhood or think of stories I’ve heard about childhood experiences. This usually leads me to some kind of linchpin in the scenario. But the last one I helped is one of the reasons I came to pay you a visit, you may be able to make something of it.”

Brad leaned forward. “Of course.”

“Well two of these patients have had the same mindscape, the same situation of entrapment if you like.” Athan said, looking at the confusion on Brad’s face.

“What?” Brad stared into space as he blew his drink to cool it down. “Surely two people can never actually share the same memories? Unless they can psychically connect…” Brad shook his head.

“Look, I’m pretty sure they weren’t psychic.” Athan shrugged. “This was a…replicated scenario, down to almost every detail.”

“Yes, go on.”

“My issue,” Athan continued, as he shifted himself on the couch, “is that I stumbled into this exact scenario again five patients later.”

Brad looked off into space, lost in thought the way he used to.

“A repressed experience repeated in the subconscious minds of two different coma patients…” Brad wondered out loud.

“That’s why I came. I thought maybe you had heard of this sort of case before.” Athan was hopeful.

Brad sat back into the lounge. “It’s impossible. No two human minds are the same. Maybe if they both had latent Post-Human abilities like psychic memory exchange. But that is merely a theory. And why would two psychics imbed that traumatic memory in each other in the first place? My best and most logical thought is a synthetic memory implant, but that isn’t something anyone can just
do
to two random people. This is something that I will dig deeper to discover.”

Athan nodded and stared at the brown carpet between the lounges.

Brad sat back to sip more of his coffee and noticed Athan’s distant look. “What else is there my friend? You are holding something back, I can tell.”

This is embarrassing…

Athan took another sip of his coffee before continuing. “I’ve been seeing things.” Bradly scoffed and shook his head.

“I have seen a figure in the landscape, and felt its presence. Something I have not felt before. I have seen things that move and make sound, even animal like things in that plane, but the figure was new. It didn’t belong.”

“Could it have been someone like you?” Brad asked.

Athan shrugged. “Maybe, I don’t know. It didn’t look like a person, its face was blank and white, and the figure was dark, like a monk in a shroud.”

“Hmm…”

“So my first thoughts were, that this being must have come from the deeper plane.” Athan took a long swig of his coffee and drained the mug.

“The one you told me about last time you paid me a visit? The one that feels dangerous?”

“Yes.” Athan nodded. “It appeared in the mind of the patient. It was like a leech drawing nutrients out of the person’s mind. I let curiosity get the better of me and decided to stick my head in to see what it was. It was terrifying; it felt like I was trapped. It was like being suspended in jelly, or being suspended in a nightmare.”