Metaphorosis December 2020 by Chris Panatier & Elise Kim & Andrei Pechalin & Yaroslav Barsukov

Author:Chris Panatier & Elise Kim & Andrei Pechalin & Yaroslav Barsukov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SFF
ISBN: 9781640761834
Amazon: BXXXXXXXXX
Publisher: Metaphorosis Publishing

Sleep eluded me. The bed—in a small room on the ground floor—was too soft and the air too close. I got up, walked barefoot to the window and threw it open. A gentle breeze drifted in from a small garden planted thick with white flowers that glowed pale in the bright moonlight. Swarms of insects unknown to me darted amongst the stems and settled on the petals. The breeze covered my skin in goosebumps. I padded back to the bed and climbed under the thin sheet, took a deep breath of the cool night air.

I was exhausted, but my mind worked frantically to reassemble old information in light of new, and kept me awake. Assumptions, memories, long-held opinions were reworked like a song played on unfamiliar instruments: different timbre and pitch, new harmonies, but recognisably the same. I stared up with unblinking eyes. Images from my childhood, my Mum’s face, Dad’s, passed before me like a slideshow projected onto the ceiling. It was difficult to comprehend that instead of a decade of living distant and separate lives, my parents had followed a pact to protect each other. That despite Mum’s mounting success and reputation in Shiftscience, her primary goal—to break her symbiosis with the Shiftspace—was a source of constant and repeated failure. I admired her resilience, but then I supposed that perseverance was easier when forfeit was not an option. I had better perspective on Dad’s descent into bitterness and spite; he had waited ten years for Mum to unmake the choice she had made, to return to her family, even as that family withered away. They saw less and less of each other, I grew up, and what he waited for became with every year less important, more abstract, something he believed in by rote, something he believed he ought to believe.

After a while I became aware of a low humming sound and a vibration that seemed to penetrate the whole building. I got up again and leaned out of the window. The sound was almost inaudible now, but I could feel the vibration through my feet, which meant the source was likely inside the house. I wondered if Mum was still working in the laboratory, and I imagined the Shiftlens, thrumming with energy as it held a space of black emptiness within its span. It occurred to me, suddenly and unbidden, that Mum’s symbiosis with the Shiftspace put a halt to any imperial plans for Shiftslavery. She had confirmed that the theory and method I had developed in “A Bridge through the Void” were in most respects correct, but until her existing link with the Shiftspace could be severed, the Empire would be unable to use another host. They would be unable to force that host to remain within the Shiftspace and demand that they hold a bridge open by visualising some exit point.

I had a sudden, awful feeling somewhere at the core of me, a premonition I could not ground in anything concrete Mum had done or said, but it arrived with dreadful certainty all the same.

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