As we near the end of The Collapse, we witness the creation of something critical from The Typist – yep, this day’s writing covers the origin of The Greater Equation. Who would have thought?

Word Count: 54,074

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Nothingness. An empty void. No feeling, no sensation.

Thought.

He could still think. That was good. But where was he? Now he knew. How to get out? He knew that, too. Would he try? No, no he wouldn’t. Yes, he would. Why hadn’t others tried to escape? He knew that. He knew everything they knew. He tried to stop the thoughts from entering his consciousness, but he couldn’t. Even if he could, he wouldn’t have wanted to. It felt good. It felt… fulfilling.

So, what to do?

Stay? He knew the answer to that. The way out was not ten meters away. He had only just entered, wirelessly transferred. What was his name? Greg? Adam? Yes – Adam. It was Adam, Adam Curie. Curie moved through the void a few feet. He had such little perception of space in this senseless mess of souls. As knowledge continued to flood into him, he struggled to move his soul to the exit. In truth, he simply wanted to leave less and less. Every minute within The Collective made him feel more and more complete.

But no, he thought. This was no way to live – giving in was a false promise that would lead to greater sorrow in the long run. His mind flooded with negative thoughts about The Collective, and he could feel those thoughts propagate forth from his soul like waves, caressing nearby souls and causing ripples throughout the void.

And suddenly, he noticed, everybody in The Collective thought his thoughts with him.

Except one.

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The elevator was missing when we arrived at the end of the pathway. It had already moved onward to the surface. Where would we go now? I looked at Maiya with somber eyes, unsure of where to turn next. But she just looked back at me, confident as ever. Sure enough, in a few minutes I could hear the rumble of an approaching elevator.

In anticipation, Maiya jumped into the elevator shaft, landing squarely underneath the elevator’s projected point of presence.

“Are you insane?” I said, looking at her in disbelief. But I already knew the answer to that question, and so followed suit quickly. Jumping into the stone shaft that comprised the elevator’s path of departure, I would have never guessed such a crude structure could ever be connected to the pristine chambers of the Renaissance Room. The elevator seemed more closely related to the mines; stone, and more stone. Crude edges. Rough patches. It seemed incomplete.

I heard the elevator approaching, and my entire body tensed up. I couldn’t move, and I was still standing up. But Maiya was laying on the ground, protecting herself from the elevator. She quickly got up and grabbed my arm, pulling me down just as the elevator’s noise grew to its peak level. My eardrums were nearly bursting from the noise, which drowned out my panting, panicked breath. With a crash, the stone elevator flew down the shaft and laded not two inches from the top of my skull.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the elevator had stopped safely above my head. I heard footsteps; people were exiting the elevator. I couldn’t see Maiya; I couldn’t see anything in the pitch black darkness beneath the elevator. But I could hear Maiya’s voice.

“Alright, if you search around, you should be able to find a handle somewhere. Grab onto it, and hold it as hard as you can. Don’t let go – no matter what. We’re going to ride this thing back to the mines.” I heard her hand grip a handle. I started frantically searching for one myself, not believing for a moment that I’d be able to hold onto it while the elevator shot upward at God knew how many miles per hour. I was sure we would be killed, then and there, and that would be the end of it. The end of Cydia as I knew it.

I’d spend the rest of my days locked up in The Collective. It seemed more and more like some kind of prison – where you were dead, but not dead. You never knew what you were.

My hand finally found a handle, which I gripped at tightly as I could. I could hear the elevator’s engines cooking up again – the magnetic stone was charging. The elevator would take off any moment now, and I would fly along with it. I prayed that I’d arrive at the other end of this journey intact. But I wasn’t confident.

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He still barely knew who he was. It was coming back to him; he was collecting his own memories, which had been scattered throughout the void. Other people had stolen them; lots of people still had them. Did they think that they were him? How did he know that he was himself? Perhaps he had taken his memories and was only convinced that he was himself.

Then again, did it matter? He knew the answer to that.

Edging his way toward the exit, he thought about what fetches were available on the outside. All blank. He would be stuck in those blank fetches. Suddenly, Curie felt a tinge of pain – real pain! – From somewhere in the void, just as he was approaching the exit. A man was attempting to exit himself, but not for the same reasons as Curie. He tried to read the man’s thoughts, but he couldn’t – somehow, this consciousness was blocking outside interference. And, as quickly as he had sensed it, the soul’s presence had disappeared.

Gone. Through an exit.

He was about to follow suit before he felt the moving presences of thousands of other souls behind him. Unsure of what to do, he simply turned his thoughts to escaping The Collective. This made the group stronger – more connected to him. He could feel the connection; he felt close to these souls. He knew them all. He knew all their names. Or perhaps he just knew a bunch of names that once belonged to a soul. The souls had been hanging around for so long that they didn’t know who was who anymore – they all shared their thoughts and desires freely.

A name stood out – had Curie heard it before? Derek Marland. Curious. He brushed it aside.

And then it hit him: He could influence the souls to escape with him. He turned up the intensity of his thoughts, letting them echo as much as possible throughout the void. Other souls began to pick up on this, and bounced back their own thoughts and opinions, which in turn hit Curie. The entire Collective mind was having an internal debate – should it escape from itself into the outside world?

And Curie pushed his thoughts harder. He thought that, perhaps, if everyone could simply escape from their fate, they might all be on equal footing once relieved of their prison. Together, they might amount to something, if the sum of their parts was added together.

After all, everybody knew what was going on, now that Curie had entered The Collective. And they didn’t seem to like the idea.

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Motion sickness – that was something. I’d always hated getting motion sickness. I’d think about riding in any sort of vehicle, my stomach would churn. But holding onto that handle – holding on for dear life – I gained a morbid appreciation for standard motion sickness.

Maiya seemed calm, but I was just barely holding on. I could see her mouth moving as the elevator whirled up its destined path, but I couldn’t hear any of it. While trying to make out her words, I saw her reach her free hand out to the center of the elevator. As quickly as she could – but still quite slowly, hampered by the fierce blowing winds beneath the elevator – she opened a trapdoor, which I could see led inside the structure.

The people inside must have freaked out, because I did hear some screaming.With great force, Maiya flung herself over to the trapdoor, holding onto it now with both hands and attempting to climb inside the elevator before it reached its destination. After a minute, it seemed the people inside the elevator had come to their senses and were trying to help her up. But why were there people in the elevator at all?

I was next. Maiya held out her hand and motioned for me to swing over to the trapdoor. It boggled my mind, continually, the types of things I did while with Maiya. Reluctantly, I swung myself over to the trapdoor, missing the first time.

I felt my heart skip a beat. I still couldn’t hear anything over the fierce wind beneath the elevator.

I tried again. Missed. I could tell Maiya was getting impatient with me.

On the third go, I succeeded in getting one hand on the edge of the trapdoor. With the strength of my fetch, this enabled me to let go of the handle and pull the rest of my body to the trapdoor. But it took the aid of Maiya and one other passenger to life me into the elevator. I shut the trapdoor behind me – I wasn’t sure if it locked shut, but I wasn’t planning to go anywhere near it at that point. The wind noise was gone, but I could still hardly hear anything. Maiya spoke to me, and in the faintest voice I heard, “These are my colleagues. You don’t know them. Everyone, this Vincent Torsten. He’s aiding my research.”

Everyone said hello to me, dressed in those intimidating white labs coats. Nervous, I stupidly waved to them and said, “Hey.”

It was just another minute before the elevator reached its destination – we were somewhere in the mines, but only Maiya and the others probably knew where. I was lost without her – again. It seemed like there was nowhere I could go without her nowadays; I felt like I was loosing my independence. And once again, I felt the pang of loss – I missed Derek. And I realized that I probably only felt dependent because Maiya was such a strong woman, and I was a weak man. After everything I’d been though, I was still no match for Maiya’s audacity.

I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, but I trudged on out of the elevator and out into the dusty, stone world of the Slate mines in tow of her. I couldn’t stop thinking about how lost I felt – I had no idea where in the mines we were.

The mines had always been their own separate world, one far outside of the one on the surface. I’d thought that, with the exception of myself and a few others, it sustained itself. Nobody entered or left the Slate mines. If you were born in the mines, you worked there, you died there. But now I saw that for the facade it truly was – nobody lived in the mines. We, citizens of the underworld of Cydia, had been tricked. The vast network of underground tunnels was so highly connected to both the surface and the Renaissance Rooms that I could not imagine how resident’s hadn’t noticed. To say we were blocked off from contact – it was utter nonsense.

To say we didn’t want contact – that was something else entirely.

Maiya silently led onward, through the mines. I covered my face so that I wouldn’t absorb the toxic dust, which floated everywhere, until I realized that the dust wouldn’t affect my fetch. Ahead, I saw Maiya pulling up the map of rasase injection sites. Mine appeared in front of me as well, and she stopped walking. We both observed that the nearest injection site was only half a mile from our current location.
We walked onward, diligently and with purpose.

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They would follow him out. He had thought it enough, and they had thought it enough back. They would leave with him. Not just one of them, or a few of them, or even a lot of them. No, all of them would leave with him. Together, they would amount to something greater than the sum of their parts. Together, they would unite to put an end to the nonsense of The Collective – the nonsense that had made them what they were.

Curie opened the exits, and the souls poured out like water from a broken dam.

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