Chapter 23: Infinity - A Dream of Waking Life

There was the inside world and there was the outside world. And neither world made any real difference to Matt. Not anymore. Not after so many years. Maybe not ever.

In the outside world, eyelids held shut, Matt’s sleeping body was hurled close to the speed of light through the intergalactic void. These were the periods of travel he relished most, for they made it easier to ignore the outside world. The approaching lenticular galaxy pierced the bottom of his eyelids with blue-shifted luminosity, but Matt barely paid the outside world any attention at all. Long ago, he had learned, or maybe relearned, how to let his body run on autopilot so that now he could reside inside his mind while a subconscious part of him searched forever through infinity for her.

For May, the foundations of the inside world vibrated, momentarily breaking Matt’s peaceful demeanor. He felt May squeeze his left hand, soothing his pain as she sat beside him on her rooftop terrace overlooking the Chicago skyline. He let her choose the direction of their lives. As long as he could feel her and breathe her and taste her and forget about insanity for a while, what did it matter?

She is all that matters, the world rumbled, but May didn’t seem to take notice. Not yet, Matt urged the world. Don’t wake me up yet.

Matt forced himself to ignore his subconscious ramblings vibrating through the world. As long as only Matt noticed those rare perturbations, the inside world remained a peaceful, sane solitude for him.

There was always the possibility of settling somewhere, anywhere in the outside world, and building a tower and even a laboratory of his own. It would enable him to block out virtually every outside distraction. But that would mean giving up on the outside world altogether. It would mean giving up on May.

There were times when the intrusions from the outside world made it necessary to break his concentration and temporarily leave the inside world. In such instances, the inside world would turn to insanity, and he would be forced to swallow more Serotel after dealing with whatever the outside world demanded of him. Sometimes it was a peculiar tower that his subconscious mind couldn’t help wondering about. Sometimes it was something new and intriguing, such as a planet of sentient May copies who appeared to be evolving and expanding beyond their planetary point of origin in an effort to search for the original Matt.

“Is it you?” the captain of a star ship representing the whole of the planet of Mays had asked Matt with pleading hope.

Matt could only shake his head and move on with his search as he reluctantly pulled himself away from a planet populated entirely by his lost love.

But those intriguing instances worth stopping for were increasingly rare now.

Of course, sometimes the intrusions were May – the May from the outside world who had accompanied him since leaving the Tower God’s side. Sometimes she just wanted some company.

She is just a creation of your mind, Matt corrected his meandering thoughts as he held May’s hand in the inside world and thought of May in the outside world.

And so is she, he reminded himself of the woman whose hand in his own was everything he needed at this moment. He felt the effects of Dr. Heron’s Serotel kick in, stabilizing reality and forcing his thoughts to a state of emptiness. But the intensifying blue glow of the galaxy in the outside world was overtaking his peripheral vision, washing out the only world he cared about: the inside world. Through the use of Serotel, he had stability in the inside world. And sanity. And most of all he had May – the way he imagined she would be in the real world.

The real May, Matt’s subconscious mind lamented, shaking the inside world so hard that even the Serotel wasn't enough.

“It’s the galaxy out there,” May explained, feeling the vibrations and remembering with terrible understanding that she was just a dream within a dream. “Go do your thing,” she said, her voice cracking with fear at the temporary but perfectly real ending of her world. “Then come back to me, okay?”

The vibrations wouldn’t abate, but with May’s hand in his own, he remained perfectly calm.

I love you, May, Matt thought, and she squeezed his hand with loving affection.

The inside world imploded, forcing the outside world to encompass the entirety of Matt’s awareness.

Without hesitation or stopping to survey the galaxy, Matt closed his eyes and visualized the mitotic division of himself a quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion times in a single instant. At most, he only needed a trillion selves to explore every star system in the galaxy, but he needed far more than that to explore every subatomic particle and every wave of light and every quantum perturbation of infinity. Every one of his copies copied themselves another quadrillion quadrillion times. Then again. Then again.

Still moving near light speed, Matt almost collided with a G-type yellow dwarf star, but his body automatically slowed to a halt during an instant free of inertia. He felt the unmistakable pull of gravity and turned to see that he was falling toward the powdery gray surface of a distant planet’s moon.

It’s Earth, Matt realized without surprise or intrigue. From the inside world, he added forlornly. So what? Matt demanded hatefully of his mind. Why did you break me away from her?

His vision zoomed in on the planet like a telescope, and he watched as the Earth spun unnaturally fast and revealed a giant, shadowy, blizzard-filled hurricane. At the center of the large eye of the storm, a cylindrical black tower jutted thousands of miles above the surface.

Matt absorbed the familiarity of the tower and the blizzard. He shuddered at the impossible expanse of time that elapsed since he had first woken naked in the cell with Mu and the other video game characters. And then he reminded himself that moment was still just the blink of an eye against the eternity that came before and the infinity that was still to come.

It must be the similarity to the tower where the Tower God undoubtedly still sleeps away eternity, Matt realized. He gave up, Matt reminded himself, disgusted with his other self. But my infinite copies and I will never give up. Never.

He shook his head at his subconscious mind.

Don’t wake me up over something so trivial, he told himself scornfully.

“May,” Matt spoke aloud, and all of a sudden, there she was, standing on the moon with him, overlooking the frostbitten Earth and wearing the same flowing ochre robe she had worn inside the Tower of God.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered as she gazed at the Earth. She tried to grasp his hand, but Matt broke away instinctively. He saw May’s features strain with heartbreak, then took her hand and kissed it.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, regretting the sadness he just inflicted on her. “I’m sorry, my love,” he repeated. “It’s just…just…” he stammered, unsure how to tell her that her presence haunted him. Though he longed for her and loved her, the knowledge that the real May might be somewhere in the outside world constantly broke his mind over and over again.

She just smiled. “I can pretend, Matt. I can be just like her – the me inside your mind. You don’t have to always go inside.”

Matt shook his head forlornly as the dream copy of a dream planet spun carelessly through the dreamscape void.

“But I can’t pretend,” Matt regretfully told her, even though he still needed her by his side to endure infinity. He knew the answer was the procedure. The Serotel was just a taste of what the final results of the procedure could offer. But he wasn’t ready for that. He wasn’t ready to give up.

“Maybe the Tower God who copied me into being,” Matt considered, remembering that this May beside him had once slept beside the Tower God…possibly for all preceding time. “Maybe he already underwent the procedure. Maybe it was a success for him.”

“He’ll wake up eventually. And he’ll be back to square one,” May intoned sorrowfully as if reading from an encyclopedia of future knowledge.

“Yes,” Matt agreed. “The procedure is just another hold over. Just another way to run away from the truth that there probably is no real world.”

“Certainly not if you give up searching for me,” May told him distantly.

Matt thought of the reality fissure that the Tower God had been unable to see.

No! Matt shook away the thought as the pain in his left hand rushed to the forefront of his attention. He lifted his hand and stared in ancient terror at the stumps of scar tissue he was still unable to grow back into fingers. It was the only thing in all infinity he could not change.

I can’t go there. Not yet, Matt thought, wincing at the thought of his entire body being shredded into searing nothingness.

He still had infinity to explore and an eternity to do it.

“I will find you,” Matt promised her for the infinite time.

“I know,” she said, sweetly and sincerely.

But of course, he couldn’t shake the reality fissure from his mind; his mind always came back to that.

She pulled him close and wrapped herself around his naked torso. He wore only loose sweatpants for comfort against his skin because he needn’t worry about actual danger, not even in the intergalactic void.

“Don’t,” May pleaded, seeing the tendrilling fissure in his thoughts.

Matt winced away tears and marveled that it had been countless pills since he last shed a tear in this world.

“It’s the only place in all infinity I haven’t gone yet –”

“Don’t,” she interrupted, openly begging him.

They had been through this before. The reality fissure was unlike anything Matt had ever encountered. It actually filled the others – May and Souvik and Fernanda – with fear. Fear of true death. Fear of erasure without any possibility of return.

It’s just part of the dream, Matt thought, intending for May to hear him. But the burning pain and missing fingers said otherwise.

“But that’s where the dream ends,” May urged. “You feel it too. You felt it. Look at your hand, Matt. It’s dangerous. It’s destruction incarnate. It's the end. Our end.” She gently lifted his left hand and tenderly kissed the mangled scar tissue. “We have infinity, Matt. We have all of infinity! Why end this?”

“Or maybe it’s the beginning, May,” Matt urged. “The end of this infinite illusion and the beginning of the real world. Maybe that’s where I’ll find you.”

May sobbed, unable to form words through her taut, tear-stained lips.

“I know,” Matt told her sorrowfully. “I know you’re here. You’re right here.”

May nodded and sobbed into his chest.

“But I can erase you if I want to,” Matt said, forcing himself to hold her at a distance. “You know I never would, but I can. I wouldn’t be able to do that in the real world. I can’t even do that in the inside world. The Serotel won’t let me…and,” Matt said, stammering as he saw tears flow freely from May’s love-sundered eyes. “And…none of it is the real you, May.”

She nodded with painful defeat, then she waved her hand and winced, erasing herself from existence. Unlike the Tower God, Matt had long ago given May complete freedom, and this wasn’t the first time she had used that power to erase herself.

Matt turned and looked back to the Earth. He felt only self-loathing for making May, real or not, destroy herself.

Keep going, he urged himself. Keep searching.

Kicking off the moon, he launched toward the Earth, turned mid-flight, then landed at the base of the tower, all in just a few seconds. His landing carried with it the force of a meteorite, blasting the surrounding area and upturning soil. The tower, however, was unscathed.

“I’m sorry, May,” Matt whispered, then he placed his hand against his head, igniting his body in a howling inferno. He let the pain of his skin flaying away from his boiling muscles fill his mind, and he told himself he deserved it.

He forced himself to feel the seething pain, letting it keep him aware as his nerves and brain boiled away until he dispersed, filling the air around the tower with increasingly ballooning volume. He intermingled with the air; his atoms became one with his surroundings, and he considered that if it was possible to experience being the environment, then maybe the entire environment was just himself. Maybe the foundations of infinity, the very fabric of being, were still just iterations of himself. The grass might be composed of atoms from Matt-copies who had decided to disperse their form and grow into others. The tower before him might be made of thousands of still aware Matt Willishes who had allowed their bodies to become the brick and mortar of another Matt’s vanguard against outside disturbances. Matt might very well be composed of atoms that had naturally all derived, at one point or another, from other Matts.

It’s true anyway, Matt told himself miserably. I’m just a copy. Everything is just a copy of a copy.

He let his body disperse further, feeling himself move in a thousand different directions all at once.

So alone, Matt remembered, and he let himself spread further into the blizzard and the planet’s outer atmosphere, feeling gravity wrap him into a spherical body.

He sighed within himself, and in response, the blizzard raged harder, threatening to converge on the tower. Matt focused his awareness and reformed his prototypical body atom by atom. He formed back into nucleotides and proteins and rebuilt the organelles of some 40 trillion cells constituting his subconsciously accepted form.

The tower still loomed at the blizzard’s center. Matt launched himself back to it, then just as he was about to collide with the impenetrable wall, he pivoted and dove at a blade of upturned grass lying haphazardly in his impact crater. This time, Matt shrank himself so that each of the blade’s upper-epidermal cells were like continents beneath the grass blade’s waxy cuticle atmosphere. All around him, he saw that several cellular continents contained lipid and nucleotide-based tower-like structures. Rather than blizzards converging on these towers, sprawling protein cyclones composed of squirming, scurrying polypeptide swarms slowly encroached on the biological towers.

Another launch sent Matt directly toward a complexly folded helical protein near the outside of the swarm. He shrank and saw its atoms as rippling frequencies, and then he entered the ripples, copying himself quadrillions of times with each passing picosecond. Soft humming lulled Matt back toward the autopilot state. May and her lullaby – it was like a siren without a trap calling for Matt to share her love.

The trap is staying here, Matt reminded himself, visualizing the reality fissure in his mind once more.

No! Matt strained against his subconscious mind. That’s the end of infinity. The end of everything. Why succumb to that when I already have infinity? Two infinities. Inside and outside. Why leave all this?

To find her, Matt’s mind answered. The real her.

Matt winced just as the coulombic forces of an electron bond intersected his awareness, flinging him across the femto-landscape like an unbound neutron.

Defying the apparent laws of the current environment’s physics, a Serotel bottle appeared in front of him with the cap already popped. He still required the Serotel as a workaround for his own mind. He tried to just focus his awareness and stabilize the dream without it, but it was like trying to inhale and exhale at the same time. The Serotel worked, and that’s all that really mattered.

Yes, Matt thought, eager to return to her and go back to living the life of a retired billionaire celebrity game developer. May was a natural at leading the company. It was like it had always been hers, and Matt had always just been a steward.

That’s just a dream, his subconscious mind told him.

I know, Matt seethed, and he conjured a mirror and fell into his own reflection, unsure where he might end up. The mirror spit him out into a slow-motion free fall over a desolate planet of bone-white sand beneath towering spires of craggy gray mountains.

Just a dream, Matt remembered painfully, knowing that whatever was on the planet made no difference. But he had to keep searching. He couldn’t give up.

He was about to begin the replication process and kick back his head to receive a mouthful of Serotel so that he could go back on autopilot, but then he saw something peculiar on the planet below.

A nighttime cityscape full of towers and streets and cars and even people was growing from the desolate sand. It was Chicago, just as Matt knew it from the inside world. Matt followed the city to its edges and saw that it tapered unnaturally to a single point moving slowly across the barren landscape. His vision zoomed in on the surface like a telescope, and he saw that the single point was, in fact, a copy of May. She gazed pleasantly into the sky as she walked without concern across the surface. Then she waved, and Matt realized she was looking directly at him.

Matt shooed away the Serotel bottle momentarily and dropped down to meet the oddity. Fluidly lowering her eyes, May followed his descent with a come-hither stare.

It’s her, Matt couldn’t help gasping. It was May, exactly as he knew her in the inside world. She wore a short black denim jacket and a sports bra that left her midriff exposed. Her diamond piercings collected and reflected the rays of the system’s distant sun, guiding Matt to her eyes – those eyes that he loved and needed and begged to consume him.

May stopped, and in response, the city stopped growing as well. Fully solid yet half-formed buildings and people shimmered ethereally behind her like fabric in a soft wind just waiting to be given free will.

“What does he do in there, anyway?” May asked casually, her slightly crooked smile and cherry lips a stark contrast against the darkness of the grimly familiar city behind her.

“Who?” Matt asked, caught off guard by her question.

“The Yang to your Yin, or Yin to your Yang or whatever,” May shrugged jovially. “Heron,” she stated simply. “What is he doing in your mind – that place you call the inside world?”

Matt shook his head. “Doing?” he checked.

“Sure,” May offered. “You spend all your time out here searching for the real me. And he spends all his time in your head doing…what?”

Matt was surprised at how vividly real she appeared. Often, the Mays he met in the outside world were somewhat robotic or even mute, but this level of convincing vividness never failed to catch him off guard.

“Are you her?” Matt couldn’t help asking. “Are you the original May?”

May shrugged easily. “Are you the original Matt?”

“No,” Matt admitted heavily. “I’m a copy.”

“Haven’t you ever experienced becoming one of your copies?” May offered sweetly.

“I’ve made countless copies of myself,” Matt admitted. “All for you…for her.”

May nodded and closed the gap between them. She took his hands, and Matt felt the weight and life of the whole city in her touch.

“You can do anything Matt, so have you ever transferred your consciousness to one of your copies?”

Matt shook his head, unsure why it mattered.

“Maybe you don’t remember ever doing it, but the fact that you’re capable of it, capable of anything, means that the term original is meaningless. Your very form is likely your own conception. The original Matt may very well be a sentient mountain. Or a thought conjured by some eldritch, non-self-aware entity imagining self-awareness. Or even me,” May giggled merrily. “Did you consider that? Maybe I’m the original, and you and Heron are my creations.”

Though Matt had considered the implication before, hearing it from her lips threatened to buckle his knees, but May kept him up with an endless well of indomitable strength.

“Who knows?” came the voice of Heron. Matt turned and saw a replica of the Dr. Heron from his dreams sauntering toward them. Behind Heron, a barren field of bone-white sand framed by the gray-washed mountains grew like jutting waves from his heels and extended beyond the horizon.

“Who knows anything,” Heron continued ominously with a tinge of subdued madness.

“Maybe you can answer my question,” May offered lethally to Heron like a jaguar sizing its prey.

Heron spread his arms wide in acceptance of her question and upturned his grim cheshire grin.

“Would you like to share what you’re up to inside his head and in this outside world too?” May asked, each of her syllables like a sharpened kunai.

Heron smiled and shrugged with mock innocence. “Existing,” he said simply.

Matt felt entranced by these dream characters, and he couldn’t help letting them challenge one another.

“He’s trying to get rid of you, Matt,” May said, ignoring what Matt assumed to be Heron’s facetiousness.

“He’s the one that can erase me,” Heron lashed. “I’m the one stuck in his head!”

“That’s the point of the procedure, Matt,” May urged. “He wants to go inside. And inside again. And inside again. Until you’re just a speck of consciousness. Until he can finally get rid of you. And then you’ll never find me, Matt. He doesn’t have your best interests at heart, he –”

“Ridiculous!” Heron interrupted with a bark. “I am him. He is me. His interests are my interests. He’s the one who designed the procedure.”

“Like you said: you are him,” May retorted.

“And you are just a delusion in our head,” Heron spat.

No! Matt rebelled inwardly at Heron’s words. She is all that matters.

Matt was jarred back to the present by the repeated realization that these were just dream characters. Without a second thought, he let go of May’s hands and closed his eyes in preparation to replicate and launch into one of the many pebbles below his feet on his way to the fissure.

“Wait!” May pleaded. “Please.”

Matt shook his head. “I’m going back there…I have to,” he said with incredible trepidation, but he conjured a vision of the reality fissure in his mind.

“No!” May pleaded, but Matt felt resolute.

“Or,” Heron began, “you can go back to her. I mean really go back for a while. A long while.”

The Serotel appeared before Matt in readied expectation.

“I’ve already tried that,” Matt explained hollowly. “The Serotel can only block out so much. And I refuse to just succumb to the tower and procedure. No,” Matt said resolutely, “there is only one place I haven’t checked yet.”

“Matt!” urged the ochre-robed May, the same May who had left the Tower of God all those years ago holding Matt’s hand and assuring him everything would be all right. She stood now between Heron and the city-sprouting May like a fulcrum between two infinite weights.

“Don’t give up!” she begged.

Tears welled in Matt’s desperate eyes, and he couldn’t help reaching out and embracing her.

“I don’t…I don’t want to,” he said between sobs. “But it’s the only place left.”

“Then just don’t go,” she pleaded. “Just accept infinity. Just stay here. Please, Matt. Please don’t leave me.”

Her words were like fire to his flesh.

“May,” Matt gasped, pushing the reality fissure out of his mind with frantic desperation. “I love you,” he told her, needing her to know, to really know, that she was his everything. That he existed for her and her alone.

“Then don’t give up,” the city-sprouting May said, echoing his ochre-robed May.

“Not yet,” Heron offered grimly.

“What’s the point?” Matt demanded, but he knew his answer was in his arms.

“Stay here for a while,” Heron offered as if he held a subtle poison. “She and I will help you stay asleep. A real sleep. A sleep where even you will forget that you’re asleep,” he said, pointing to the May with the sprawling city sprouting from each of her steps.

Matt turned to check with her, and the city-sprouting May nodded in approval of Heron’s words.

“Sounds like the point of the procedure,” Matt said hopelessly. “Should I build a tower and a set of laboratories for you too?”

Heron accepted Matt’s words with unnatural patience. “What I offer you is similar, just more chaotic and not at all permanent. But you won’t notice the chaos for a while. And I can make it last a long time. A very long time,” Heron practically purred. “Think of it as a trip. My gift to you.”

“What are you offering me?” Matt urged with incredible suspicion.

The ochre-robed May put a hand on Matt’s shoulder and squeezed it in warning.

“I don’t trust him,” she whispered in his ear. “I don’t trust either of them.”

“But you can trust me,” the city-sprouting May assured him.

“I can make it so that even you get reset inside your mind,” Heron continued. “Each pill will represent a day in a dream of waking life. And each day will be a full reset. But you’ll forget all about the outside world. For a while, at least. And it won’t be confusing and disorienting like the procedure.”

“This is just a reprieve,” the city-sprouting May continued as if sharing a mind with Dr. Heron. “If you’re planning on giving up anyway, why not take a little break first?”

“I’m not giving up,” Matt urged. “I’m just as scared as you are of going into the fissure. But I have to, May. Because I can’t give up. And you might be there. The real you!”

May shook her head through a fog of sorrow. “Please just take a little break before you make that decision, Matthew.”

Matt shook his head, rejecting the offer.

“I don’t need a break,” Matt told her. “I’ll keep searching. But eventually I have to go into that fissure, May. We both know that.”

The ochre-robed May shook her head at his words. “No, Matt. You don’t have to destroy yourself. And me. And everything. Even Heron. You don’t have to give up on the infinity you’ve been granted for whatever reason. You can just…you can just accept it.”

“I can’t!” Matt winced, feeling utterly defeated. “I can’t just accept the unreal world when there still might be a real world. It’s the same as giving up on her…on you…”

A surge of buzzing intensity suddenly slammed against his solar plexus and forced him to his knees.

“Your mind is overworked,” Heron told him, smiling suddenly at the sight of Matt falling to the ground.

“Why not take a break?” the city-sprouting May offered with sweet poison on her lips.

“We should leave,” his own May urged.

Though there was no need to breathe, it was still something Matt did out of habit. The air suddenly felt heavy, and his body quickly grew old and wary.

Like I’m an old man again, Matt realized. He let his knees sink further to the ground as eons of exhaustion caught up with him.

Maybe I’ll just rest for just a little while, Matt considered, desperate to taste what Heron was offering despite knowing that it meant putting his search – the only thing that mattered – on hold. What’s one little break in infinity?

Matt’s own May looked horrified, and as she tried to bend down to check on him, the other May moved forward and used her towers to push his May out of sight.

Let me just have a minute to rest, Matt thought, intending for his May to read his thoughts. But she was totally out of sight now.

“I need you to take a break even more than you need one, Matthew,” Heron said, converging on Matt with the other May so that the barren emptiness and the vibrant city lights centered directly on him. “Every time you leave the inside world and it gets destroyed, I experience that. I lose years of work. I lose parts of myself. Every single time you come back here.”

Matt felt the ground beneath him sink like quicksand deeper into the planet, forming a shallow crater in the sand. His body was totally immobilized as ancient fatigue robbed his muscles of mobility. He didn’t want to admit it, but he wanted the break. He needed the reprieve. His infinity-shattered mind begged for whatever Heron could offer him at that moment.

But I’m not giving up, May, Matt breathed as the exhaustion began to pull his eyelids closed.

Without warning, Heron placed his fingers inside Matt’s mouth and pried his jaw open from the inside.

May strode forward, her smile sweeter than ever as buildings and faces sprang from her heels and filled the desolate space behind her with rapacious rapidity. The bottle of Serotel was in her hand.

“Stay inside for a while and let me get some work done, Matthew,” Heron commanded just as May tilted the bottle and let loose an endless stream, allowing the crimson fluid to flow down Matt’s throat with ferocious force and fill every corner of his consciousness.