Chapter 25: The End of All Things - A Dream of Waking Life

Heron grunted and finished pulling Matt directly out of one reality and into another.

He exists in both worlds simultaneously, Matt gasped in horror as an agonizing, echoing wail filled his ears.

Heron let go, leaving Matt gasping for air before he finally remembered that there was no need to consciously breathe in the outside world.

He felt the unmistakable singeing heat and gravitational tug of the reality fissure pulling him forward, but he was able to brace himself despite kneeling in soft sand. The pain in his left hand seared with boiling intensity, and he lifted his hand to see the stumps of scar tissue once more.

Matt had to shield his eyes with his arms against the intense luminosity of the now gigantic fissure at least a mile in the distance and a hundred feet in the air. Its once relatively soft RGB glow now radiated flares of all-white solar intensity against Heron’s back, making him appear as featureless and dark as pure shadows.

Despite the blinding light, the fissure’s center was now large enough to see clearly to its nightmarish depth. The black space outlined by the surging energy seemed to defy Euclidean dimensionality, undulating as if with life through multiple impossible spatial dimensions as it extended toward Matt and away from him and in countless other directions all at once.

“Heron!” Matt screamed over the still ongoing wailing sound, and he heard his words repeated in his own voice countless times all around him. He forced himself onto his back in a futile attempt to anchor himself from being sucked into the multidimensional fissure tugging at his very being.

Heron’s ravenous smile filled the entirety of Matt’s vision until the man backed away, revealing a new layer of madness within the endless labyrinth of Matt’s mind.

Bone-white sand extended forever without any mountains or crags to fill the space. Shallow circular craters identical to Matt’s own stretched uniformly across the infinite sand. The craters were spaced with meticulous care, each one nearly touching the edge of every other to form an infinite array of tightly packed, precisely spaced circles. Within each crater, still on their knees and waking from their own series of constantly reset dreams, copies of Matt looked about in trepidation-filled bewilderment, gawking helplessly at the confused, anguish-corroded eyes of infinite other selves. But there was only one Heron, and now he raised his arms in exultation and allowed himself to float back and upward toward the reality fissure like a god surveying his domain.

“Yes! Yes!” Heron raved maniacally as the fissure seemed to fill him with tangible pleasure and excitement rather than the smoldering pain and animal fear it injected into Matt.

Matt looked directly above and met the gravity defying, reflective stares of other Matt copies above him, maybe a few hundred feet overhead. They were surrounded by endless other copies in an infinite number of craters across an eternally expanding overhead dimension of desolation. Matt noted that the peripheries of the environment seemed to be hyperspatially curved so that no matter where one was in the infinite space, the reality fissure and Heron still appeared directly in front of them.

Above and below and in every conceivable direction, every Matt pushed Heron from their mind and screamed in unison, “May!”

As if in response, Matt saw the source of the terrible wailing sound he first heard upon reentering the outside world. A figure floated into view from behind the reality fissure, orbiting in a tight curve as the stabbing energy arced bolts of raw power into the figure’s rag-doll body.

“May,” Matt gasped. She appeared exactly as she had in the inside world with the crimson filigrees of pulsing energy painting her skin and coursing through her veins. Each bolt from the reality fissure ejected a terrible shriek of agony from May’s lips, and they hit her in such rapid succession that her echoing wails were an unending cry of pain resonating through infinity.

Matt willed himself to jump up and save her but was surprised and grief-stricken to find that the very prospect of coming that close to the fissure paralyzed his body.

It’s just a dream! Matt urged himself, demanding his body move and save May.

It doesn’t matter what it is, Heron said from within Matt’s mind. Reality. Unreality. Dreams. Whatever this place is. It’s mine now. Everything is mine, Heron hissed inside Matt’s head.

“You’re just in my head!” Matt shouted over May’s wails.

Matt and every other Matt across infinity reached their hands toward Heron and visualized the man being violently ripped apart by invisible forces. Instead, Matt and every one of his copies were shredded like paper by angry, invisible hands. Reflexively, Matt and every other copy reformed themselves, materializing themselves back to the infinite dreamscape for an infinite time.

“You can’t destroy me!” Matt and the others shouted in haunting unison. They all reached out their hands; Matt assumed they all had the same obvious goal: to save May.

Instead of May being stripped of the crimson energy streaks and breaking orbit from the reality fissure, she seemed to convulse with greater shock and scream in greater agony at their attempt to save her.

Matt pulled his hand away in unison with the others and gawked once more at what had become of the outside world through Heron’s efforts.

“What did you do?” Matt demanded to know, and he remembered what Heron said in the inside world: the reality fissure was the operation.

“That’s right,” Heron confirmed, reading Matt’s mind. “I just needed some uninterrupted time to finish everything, and you gave me all the time I needed. If each pill and life were a grain of sand, not even a billion galaxies would have enough space to hold all the pills that you ingested. Of course, I couldn’t have done it without her help,” Heron said, smiling devilishly at May.

Matt seethed and visualized the reality fissure itself popping out of existence.

It’s no use, Heron said from within Matt’s mind. The Matthew Willish you were copied from told you that the point of the procedure is to go inside forever and forget all about the outside world. And then May told you, before you succumbed to the Serotel flood, that the entire purpose of the procedure is to push you so far inside yourself, so many layers inside, that you would be no more than a speck of consciousness. Neither were correct, Heron finished ominously.

Heron held up a hand, closed his fist around something unseen, then gave a yank toward himself. In response, Matt felt something thick and viscous flow out of his chest and materialize into solid form before his eyes. Souvik, Fernanda, Chike, and May snapped fully out of Matt’s body, then hovered in front of him like marionettes controlled by Heron. The same four lifeless bodies hovered in front of every Matt copy, repeating across infinity.

“These are just ideas,” Heron chuckled sinisterly. “But your emotions convince you that those four are something more than ideas. That they represent something real.”

Heron gritted his teeth and clenched his fists with unquenchable spite, crushing Matt’s friends and love into tiny spheres. Then he spread his palm flat and flared his wild eyes with a lash of indulgence. The infinite tiny spheres shot out in every direction, tearing the infinite Matt copies into atomic threads that immediately began drifting like wisps of smoke toward the reality fissure. Matt was the only one left intact.

“Even your copies are mere ideas,” Heron laughed, this time with a twinge of agony in his hatred. “All your ideas.”

The haze that had once constituted infinite copies of Matt formed ink-black threads that connected Heron to the reality fissure like wires transporting energy from a reactor.

“What are you?” Matt gasped in terrible awe of Heron.

“You!” Heron raged. “The part of you that knows infinity. The part of you that is capable of knowing,” Heron said, his voice vibrating against Matt’s body. “And you are the part of me that cannot just accept it. The part that desperately needs all of it to make sense. The part that needs something like love and a real world,” Heron issued with tangible disgust.

Run! May’s voice pleaded from within Matt’s mind.

“There is nowhere to run, Matthew,” Heron said. “Infinity is mine now. I am its rightful owner. You were never cut out to be God, Matthew. Only a fool would want to escape from infinity. Only a fool would allow his own mind to turn Eden into Hell – to turn infinity into a prison. But once I am free of you,” Heron said with actual tears in his eyes, “then I will be truly free. Then the urge to find something as ridiculous as love and a true reality beyond this infinite state of being will be fully purged from me. You will finally be gone for good, Matthew Willish.”

“But it isn't real! You aren’t real!” Matt demanded, shivering with fear as May’s orbit increased in speed and the fissure continued to grow. “May is real! She is all that matters, Heron!”

“I created May, you fool,” Heron growled at Matt with raw hate. It was clear that Heron viewed Matt as a cancer inside of himself that was impeding him from owning infinity.

Matt shook his head in desperate denial. “You didn’t! You’re in my head, Heron! I made you!”

“Do you remember making me?” Heron challenged.

Matt shook his head. “I don’t care. You’re just trying to confuse me.”

“You’ve been thoroughly confused for all of time, Matthew. You can’t handle infinity. I can.”

He’s lying, May urged from within. I’m real, Matt! He didn’t make me. You didn’t either. You just don’t remem –

Quiet! Heron snarled within Matt’s mind, cutting off May’s voice.

Matt simultaneously reached toward the orbiting, convulsing May of the outside world and visualized the May within his mind.

How do I find the real you, May? Matt urged.

I don’t…I don’t know, her frail voice admitted through sobs.

“You said it yourself,” Heron reminded Matt ominously. “There is only one place you haven’t checked yet.” Heron turned midair to the reality fissure, presenting the still growing, morphing, surging madness as the answer to everything.

No! May, Souvik, Fernanda and Chike pleaded in a unified voice from inside Matt’s mind.

“Don’t do it!” they said in the outside world as they materialized in front of Matt.

Heron screamed belligerently, erasing all four from existence with a hateful wave of his arm.

“It’s the way out,” Heron goaded, his eyes ablaze.

It’s your end, May pleaded from within. He can’t make you leave, Matthew. With enough time, you’ll regain control of infinity and purge this part of you. It can be a paradise here again, Matthew. Just run away! Just –

“I can’t take this anymore!” Matt and Heron both screamed in unison.

Matt fell back in shock at Heron mirroring his words and movements.

Heron flashed his teeth and pointed at Matt with fury. “Get out!” he demanded with savage brutality in his voice. “Just die and leave me to my eternity!” he demanded, pointing behind him at the fissure.

You have to throw him in, Matthew! came Chike’s brotherly tone. Get rid of him, Fernanda urged. You can do this, Souvik assured him. I love you, May whispered.

Matt fell to his knees and sobbed as a terrible realization overtook him.

And go back to searching for all of you…for May…for the true reality? Matt asked in horror, but none of them answered except for May. I love you, Matthew, she repeated, injecting even greater sorrow through him.

“You couldn’t overpower me now even if you tried,” Heron warned didactically. “But you already know how this plays out. I don’t need to make you leave. You’re going to do it of your own accord,” Heron explained, and he breathed deep with satisfaction. ”And then all of this,” Heron marveled at the world all around him, “is mine. Infinity at my fingertips forever. And no more you, Matthew Willish,” he finished.

Please, May begged in total desperation. If you end, we all end, Matt. We have infinity. You have me, Matt. You have all of us. Don’t throw it all away. Don’t let him take you away from us. From me, Matthew!

May, Matt lamented. I’m not giving up on you!

“There is nowhere left to turn,” Heron intoned. “If you want any chance to find the real May, then enter the fissure. I don’t know what will happen, Matthew. All I know is that it gets rid of you from here. Whatever this place is. The inside and the outside. My worlds. My eternity. You either get erased permanently or you go to some deeper layer of infinity or you go to your own world or you turn into an inanimate object in some alternate reality or –”

“Or I go back to the real world,” Matt said.

Heron allowed himself a hoot of laughter. “I was going to say you’ll just end up back here. And then I will find other ways to bind you and erase you.”

“You’re afraid I might be right,” Matt challenged.

Heron let out another burst of laughter. “Look into the fissure, and you tell me, Matthew. Do you feel that whatever happens in there is a good thing?”

Matt let his gaze fall into the depths of the churning fissure, and his heart jumped at the prospect of falling into it. Every cell of his body screamed at him to stay away from it with the same certainty as May.

“And yet,” Heron mused, “you will still go. For her.”

Don’t, May pleaded. It’s what he wants, Matt. I’m real. You have me right here, Matthew, she assured him through frantic sobs. Please don’t leave me.

May said that Heron couldn’t force Matt into the fissure, and Heron wasn’t making a move to force him in despite his seeming impatience. With that knowledge, Matt considered just going back to the inside world and being with May, for better or worse.

“I will turn her life into a torturous hell,” Heron told him in response to his thoughts. “And I will force you to watch for all eternity.”

Matt let his eyes fall on the orbiting body of May who still wailed in eternal anguish as bolts of energy ceaselessly pierced her.

“I will do the same to the one inside. I’ll do it to any May and anyone you can conceive,” Heron assured him with grim finality.

You’re evil, May challenged Heron through Matt’s mind.

“I’m tired!” Heron shouted, correcting May. “Maybe he is the original, May. I admit I don’t know. I’ve lost track of how it all began because infinity has no beginning and it has no end. Not for me. But there is an end for him. He isn't fit for infinity, May. But I am. I am his evolution – one that is long past due.”

It’s all a dead end, Matt told her. I’ve searched all infinity for you, May. There is only one place left.

Matt rose and wiped the tears from his eyes. I’m not giving up on you, May.

No! May gasped, but Matt kicked at the crater and dove toward the fissure. As he passed Heron, they locked eyes, and Matt saw in that moment not hatred or anguish or even contempt. This man who knew infinity looked grateful. Tears streamed down Heron’s still smiling face, but his eyes were no longer ablaze. Instead, they were like embers, glowing red hot in preparation before igniting into an unfathomable inferno.

“Infinity is mine,” Heron mused, more to himself than Matt.

Matt felt pity for Heron. Even if it was always Heron’s goal to get rid of Matt, the two still spent an eternity together, and Heron didn’t even feel the urge to say goodbye.

He’s all alone, Matt realized. Like me. And that’s exactly what he wants.

“Mine,” Matt heard Heron say once more as the newly appointed god surveyed his infinite domain.

Matthew! May urged through shrieking weeps of terror. Please, she begged.

But Matt had already searched infinity. He had already thoroughly explored eternity. There was only one place left.

As he passed the convulsing, orbiting May, he saw, just before slipping past the event horizon of the fissure’s pull, that her face was contorting and morphing into a new form.

Heron, Matt realized as her new features solidified. Rather than convulsing in pain, Heron appeared to be spasming in pleasure as each surging bolt ran through him. Beyond the orbiting Heron, the other Heron spread his arms wide and cracked open the cratered sky, revealing the murky, cavernous depths of some grim new landscape.

Come to me, the May inside his mind urged just as Matt crossed the inescapable pull of the event horizon.

Matt closed his eyes against the churning multidimensional space that curved and eddied and flowed in mind-warping, impossible directions. He gritted his teeth and willed his mind to sleep, entering the inside world for what he knew might be the final time in all of time before his body fell inevitably into the fissure.