With one day left to approach 100,000 words – my goal for this crazy month – we find that our heroic trio might just have to give up searching City Square – not because they’ve found nothing, but because they’ve found too much. Graham is thrust out of consciousness and into The Collective, and the end of the Cydia arc begins. You’ll see a huge transition in the next writing as I take the situation from one world to three worlds – Cydia, Talos, and Earth.

I’ll hit 100,000 tomorrow, and continue writing until December 6th, when I’ll reach the novel’s ending at no less than 120,000 words. It’s been an awesome November!

Word Count: 95,081

He went upward, floor after floor, checking the containers for any substances other than inactive fetches. Fetches of all kinds were stored in the containers without discrimination – from the large to the small, the black to the white, even the strange fetches: animals and surreal creatures that could only have been dreamt up in the minds of men. He tried to pry the containers open, but knew they were clamped shut tight – it was impossible for even his fetch to pry open the device. Cautious, and knowing he might have been seen attempting to free these fetches, he bolted down to the ground level.

Ames and Graham were gone. They were lower down still, and were attempting to accomplish Variable’s failed feats. Effortlessly they tried to open the containers that lay neatly stacked around several floors within reach. Graham, after exploring several floors, began to wonder where these containers were going to, and why the oblong shape was being used to store weapons and materials, and not fetches, not knowing what Variable had discovered on the upper floors.

And then Ames caught a glimpse of the robotic arms – she stared at them intently, keeping here eyes firmly fixed on their presence, realizing their similarity to the arms used to rip Wheat apart back during their last moments on Talos. Her entire body froze up – she was too afraid to move. She kept thinking of Wheat, of Danil.

At the same time, Graham found a container with several parts that greatly resembled those used to build the Wheatbot, and so too did he freeze up, but only before running away from the scene. He shook Ames, “Ames, Ames! We’ve got to get out of here!” She remained still, leaving Graham no choice but to escape and return back to her with Variable.

He found Variable hanging around on ground level, nervously twitching around and pacing the room. Variable could not contain himself once he saw Graham, “James!” he shouted. “I’ve found something n the upper floors, you must see it. A collection of fetches, their numbers surely in the thousands and ten thousands, inactive and sealed just above us!”

Graham could not believe his ears – he wad sure that City Square was the base of the shipping operations to Talos. What did fetches have to do with anything? He looked at Variable, puzzled. “That’s not what I found.”

“What? What did you find?”

“There’s no time to explain – just come with me. Jess is still down there; if someone’s in this building, and I’m sure someone is, she could be captured or killed. But she’s completely out of it. It’s down a few floors – you coming?”

“Yes, yes. Quite sorry.” Variable rushed towards Graham, who had already shot down several floors via the light elevator, and they came upon Ames still frozen and staring at the constantly flow of mechanical arms along the eastern wall. Yet for some reason Variable did not notice the rampant flow of technology through the room; that although there were containers, they did not contain fetches. Instead they were filled to the brim with weapons and parts soon to be Talos-bound, but he acted as if nothing was there.

The two men tore Ames away from her spot and carried her to the ground level, where she at last regained consciousness. “Those mechanical arms,” she said to Graham, “they looked just like the ones Ford used to… to…”

Graham hushed her. “I know. Don’t let it get to you yet – I have a feeling there’s more where that came from. We should focus on finding who is doing this so that we can negotiate with them.”

“And you’ll be doing nothing for Maiya?” Variable said. “Well, if you’re focused solely on—”

“Variable, shut up!” Graham shouted at the man, trying to focus his attention on the technology being moved to Talos as they spoke. “Maiya can wait. Do you realize what we’ve found? This is why Jess and I came to Cydia. This is undoubtedly the base of their shipping operations, and we can’t waste our time looking for someone who we thought might have a clue to its location when we’ve found that location on our own! I’m sorry, but this ends our search.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Variable – pointing to the far end of the ground level room. A single container harboring a fetch had been shoved into the corner just out of immediate visibility. A fetch, a young woman with tanned skin and deep brown hair, rested lifelessly within the unbreakable glass coffin. Variable choked up slightly, concerned for the empty fetch if only for one reason. “That is Maiya.”

“That’s just am empty fetch, it could be anybody’s. I still think we should–”

“Maiya was not simply a former researcher and scientist for The Collective; she was also a skilled tailor. She custom made all of her fetches with her own hands, and this is most certainly her work. It was also the last fetch I saw her use, so many months ago. James, this is without a doubt her fetch. But her mind is not within it, and the rest of her fetches were missing from her house. James, we must continue searching.”

“If we can trace the crates to their origin I’m sure we’ll find something worthwhile for both of us, but an entire world hangs in the balance as we do so. With every passing minute Talos leans closer towards total destruction, and I won’t allow that to happen. We won’t allow that to happen,” Graham said, looking at Ames, who smiled back at him.

Suddenly, all three heard a loud whining in their ears; Graham and Ames’s glasses shook violently, as if they were attempting to process something far grander than their specifications permitted. A glass screen began to form in front of them, monstrous in size, containing a picture of a man long lost, but certainly not forgotten – Wheat. And in this gigantic glass frame Wheat’s robotic form began to move and speak to all three of them.

“Connection… established.” His pipe-ridden face contorted into a smile; Ames and Graham could not have felt more relieved, or more frightened.

“Who is this?” Variable asked.

“Who are you?” asked the Wheatbot on screen.

“I am a Variable, a single unit within the greater Equation. My identity is of no use to you, whoever you are, and I suggest you leave this frequency at once.”

“Varible, no need to be so rude. What, how are you doing this? This is incredible – all the way from Talos?” Ames said. “I don’t believe it.”

“There is a dimensional break,” the Wheatbot said, out of breath from the longer sentence. It seemed his steam could only fuel the shortest sentences. “Nearby you as well.”

“That must be where the items are moving between worlds. There would have to be a pretty huge portal to move all the stuff here,” Graham said. “Wheat, you’re using a frequency that can travel through the portal? Then I assume you’ve found out plenty in our absence. Don’t waste your breath telling us about Talos; tel us once we’ve stopped this damned operation.”

“No.”

“No?”

“You canno—”

The signal cut out, and the glass shattered, piercing Variable’s skin and making him double over on the floor in pain. Behind them, at the entrance to City Square, stood a man in a whit lab coat surrounded on all sides by men carrying hefty guns.

“Who are all of you? Actually, it doesn’t matter. I thought I smelled intruders.” The man looked to the gun-touting beings around him and signaled their march forward. “Kill them.”

At once, no less than ten soldiers began firing at the group. Ames immediately took out her mu gun and, without knowledge of the device, successfully created a shield that blocked the incoming bullets. “It responds to thoughts!” she shouted. “That’s why there were no buttons on this thing. Well then, let’s see what it can do.”

Ames dismantled the shield and sent an electric shock flying across the room at the team of men, stunning them momentarily, but it wasn’t long enough. Before she was able to pull the shield up again, a bullet hit her in the arm. She dropped the mu gun and fell to the floor, holding her arm and screaming. Soon after, Graham was hit, as was Variable. But although Graham and Ames were in distressing amounts of pain, Variable seemed unfazed by the bullet. Suddenly, Graham saw more than ten bullets at once pierce Variable’s fetch. It shook violently, attempting to keep a hold on Variable’s consciousness, but failed and slumped over lifeless.

The scientist, who had remained hidden behind the men shooting, quickly called for a cease-fire. “Stop firing, they’re not in fetches!” The bullets ceased, and the man walked over to Graham and Ames. He bent down, touched the blood that trickled from their wounds with his index finger, and licked off to taste. His face contorted, and he seemed to derive pleasure from it. “Real blood… this is something quite new indeed. You’re both from Talos.” He snapped up the mu gun. “I think I’ll take this. These are for knights only, if I’m not mistaken, and neither of you are dressed in Taconic Slate! I know just what to do with the two of you.”

The mu gun, in his hands, lit up a brilliant blue. The light surrounded both Graham and Ames, forming a blue bubble around their bodies and suspending them in the air, and their near-unconscious bodies huddled next to one another. Through the bubble, Graham tried to speak with the man.

“Why are you doing this?”

“If you came here from Talos, then I’m sure you know.”

“No, not that,” Graham said, chuckling at the man’s expected misunderstanding. “He found fetches, thousands of them, on the upper floors.”

The man was silent.

“If you won’t tell me that,” Graham said, fatigued and losing consciousness quickly, “tell me this: Why are you in a fetch? Why are so many people in fetches, when they can live in The Collective?”

The man laughed, as if to affirm the validity of Graham’s question. “Do not ask us why we are,” he said, “but ask us how!”

Yet, just as Graham was about to oblige the man’s request, he slipped out of consciousness along with Ames, and the room – and everything else about City Square, become fuzzy and eventually erased itself from his view.

* *  *   *    *     *      *       *        *          *          *         *        *       *      *     *    *   *  * *

Graham did not wake up. He floated, in space, alone. But at the same time, he was not alone – he was with everyone, his mind one with the planet, one with the billions of other consciousnesses encroached in a gigantic web of thoughts. Was it a dream? Was it a nightmare? Would he see President Ford once more, strolling along with his stately cane, taunting Graham? There were no answers in this place. Graham half expected he would suddenly jerk to life, and be back in his bed on Earth, Curie’s lock still dismantled next to his front door.

But of course, this never came to be. Graham continued to float in this mindless void – yet he felt conscious. He looked around, but there was nothing to see. He tried to feel where he was, but there was nothing to feel. There was neither heat nor cold in this place, neither sight nor sound, only knowledge – infinite amounts of knowledge flowing in an out of his brain, every fact as insignificant as the next. He tied to control his limbs to feel his head, to confirm his existence, but there were not limbs to use.

Yet he knew he was alive. Somewhere along the line he had slipped out of consciousness in front of the scientist back in City Square and reawaken in this abyss of thought. No, it was not a dream – it was an endless network of minds. He could sense the presence of every mind on Cydia through this web, and as if by instinct alone he sensed Ames’s presence nearby, and Variable’s as well, and his mind could tell the difference between these presences and all the other presences on Cydia.

Taconic Slate. He had none – and through his resources in this empty void of knowledge, he learned that Cydia had none. That the strange metal that made up the walls and roofs of the infinitely tall skyscrapers of Cydia’s major cities in the sky was known to the Cydians as Taconic Slate. That, at one point, all the minds of Cydia seemed to remember the planet being that much larger – until one day an earthquake struck the land, and it collapsed unto itself. Graham, surprisingly, could see and even remember this collapse as vividly as if he’d been there himself, though he knew he’d never been to Cydia before his unfortunate fall into Talos.

He could see the frightened minds of the people as their homes were crushed, brought into the core of the planet and demolished. He watched, through the minds of other citizens in the network, the destruction of an entire people, and the frantic race to save whoever might be left by storing all of their minds in a gigantic data center, ordered for immediate construction by the last remaining Cydian leaders. Anybody who wanted to survive was made fetch-compatible, and stored in the data center.
Where Graham was now. Where Ames and Variable were now. Inside of The Collective.

Graham panicked, calmed, and panicked again – he was not sure what to think. The Collective, to a degree, controlled his mind; his consciousness had an innate reasoning within it that agreed with everyone else in The Collective, and he suddenly founding himself believing was a wonderful, yet dull, life it was floating as a bodiless consciousness. How could he leave? How could he find Ames and Variable, and remove them as well?

Half of his mind fought him. He wanted to remain in The Collective, in this giant data center at the core of the planet. Yet the other half of him imminently missed the pleasured of free thinking, feeling, tasting – all his senses in the collective were dulled and reduced to memory. The memories never faded, and they were infinite in number, as his mind accessed the minds of others around him and fed him randomized memories. Graham could feel his mind merging with the billions of other consciousnesses in The Collective; it was not long before his mind was exactly the same as everyone else’s.

One mind. One collective consciousness. A decision making machine with thousands of years of experience and the minds of billions of people to back its decisions up. And yet, part of Graham thought that it was the worst decision any group of leaders could have possibly made.

“James Graham, are you there? I can feel you.”

It was Ames. Ames was contacting him! But how? Suddenly, a flood of memories rushed into his mind, answering his question; the minds could communicate with one another in a way that seemed telepathic – in reality, the electrical impulses sent normally by the brain were instead begin sent across countless wires to other clusters of minds, who interpreted these signals as language and read it for their benefit. The memories taught him that Ames had found his mind floating in the abyss and sent signals to it. Her consciousness was not moving closer in physical terms, but inside the void where all the minds hung in a thick, conscious soup, her mind was making its way ever closer to Graham’s.

Both were on the lookout for Variable, but neither had ever known his true identity, if he’d ever even had one.

Graham’s mind was overwhelmed. He tried to open his eyes, which once again were not there; this strange feeling of attempting to convulse muscles that did not exist was not fading minute after minute. His mind was used to having a body – freely floating in space was something he simply could not get used to. He made it his object to leave The Collective, just as Variable had long ago – just as thousands had to join the greater Equation. But he needed a fetch, and how could one procure a fetch, when one’s mind was bodiless, floating in a void at the center of a planet?

Graham suddenly regretted coming to Cydia. He could no longer see Ames, Wheat, or even his newest companion, Variable. Everybody was lost. Even if their minds remained, only the memories of their appearances still existed in tangible form. Graham’s mind attempted to reach out and grab these memories; he successfully called them up, but it only made him melancholy.

And, at once, the entire Collective worked against his sadness. He could feel the push of billions of minds sending him reassuring memories. Visions of holiday dinners with his relatives, stood out prominently in his mind and cheered him up, but there was a looming sense of falsehood in these memories. Were they really his relatives? His mind would have him believe so. But they could have just as easily been someone else’s relatives; memories from The Collective constantly fused with his mind, granting him knew knowledge, but destroying his individual identity. He became less and less aware which memories were his, and which were the memories of others.

But he clung with all his might to his own mind, making sure that it went nowhere, that when someone from the outside world came along with a fetch, they would be able to reach into this void and grab his mind, yank it out as forcefully as possible and implant it in the artificial body.

Without his mouth he shouted, “Save me from this hell!” The whole world heard him, but did nothing. He heard the whole world respond, but could do nothing.

“James. James! Where are you?” He could hear it! Ames’s voice was calling him! He only needed to slosh his mind through the thickness of the void until he reached it. He gathered the necessary intelligence at once from The Collective, and began moving his digitally translated mind across the network. He could sense that Ames’s mind was close.

And then it disappeared.

Despair overcame Graham, and he was flooded once again with happy, false memories from billions of minds around the void. He resisted, and tried to follow Ames’s consciousness, but the void pulsated and kept him in with a riptide of thoughts. He saw again the devastating collapse of the planet, and felt all the pain that the world felt those thousands of years ago. He saw the world today compared with the world of yesterday, and knew that the world had not changed since. The world had remained a wasteland, hungry for power, hungry for knowledge, with nothing left of land but the datacenter at its core and the few surviving patches of land that floated in the sky, held in by the sheer density and gravity of the data center.

It was The Collective that decided, with the opinions of every mind of the planet gathered as one, to redistrict the planet into 199 cubical sections, and to allow its own pieces to split off and once again become individual minds but with the consequence of losing most of the knowledge available inside of The Collective.

The human mind can only hold so much. It was up to the individual consciousness to decide what it could keep, and what else it had to leave behind, when exiting via a fetch. In time, Country 200 was built high up in space to boost the Cydian economy – for one had formed outside of The Collective, against The Collective’s will, as fewer and fewer minds that exited ever returned. Yet The Collective’s attempts to also use Country 200 as a research center to further its aggregate knowledge attributed greatly to its death. When one of The Collective’s experiments, performed by people temporarily placed in fetches, released several toxic gasses across Country 200 that began to erode the fetches of tourists, everyone fled the land at once and never looked back.

Yet the more daring researchers and scientists could still, at times, visit the decrepit country and utilize its remaining resources for other purposes.