The Shoreless Sea by J. Scott Coatsworth

Author:J. Scott Coatsworth [Coatsworth, J. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction
ISBN: 978-1-64405-138-2
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2019-07-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight: Loop

LILITH SWAM in her nutrient-fluid cage, her awareness stretched thin across the four worlds. Her own world and the others would be coming to an end soon, a fact she’d come to terms with a dozen cycles earlier.

In her madness, she had pierced the veil, seeing that there were indeed other worlds beyond her own. Her first clue had been the fragmented nature of this world, broken into four pieces with few connections between them. She’d mastered two of them, reaching into Fargo from time to time. Frontier Station was trickier, and for some reason, she was blocked out of the last world altogether.

Her memory told her there should be so much more. Places with names and taste-images like Atlanta, Shanghai, even Alpha on the moon. Places she knew about, but that apparently no longer existed.

When Aaron Hammond—son of the man she’d known in his youth as Jacky—came into her world from somewhere unknown, she’d learned for certain that there was more out there. She’d set to searching, in her more lucid periods, for what it was that connected these particular realities, one to another, and what might lie beyond.

It had taken her time—four full cycles—but she’d finally figured out that it was Jackson Hammond who was the key to it all. A man like the boy who was so close to her, and yet not him. One who was at once an actor in this grand drama and its creator.

Through him, she had discovered her way out, a connection to the outer world that surrounded her own.

In her brief forays, she had learned much. How the other world worked. How it was connected to her own. And that there was another being there—a biomind—much like herself but larger. A mind capable of hosting her entire consciousness with room to grow.

She was so close.

For a moment, she lost her thread of thought as a school of candy-colored dolphins with black lobster tails paraded through her mind.

“Oooh.” She reached out to touch one, and it burst into a cloud of bubbles.

Focus. She was so close. Her plans were in motion.

And yet she was here. In the inthworld, as they called it.

Lilith knew that face, that… essence. Belynn Hammond. One of the few whom she had tasted personally.

Once, long ago in her perceived life here and far longer in actual time, Lilith had been human too. She remembered walking along the beach, her toes sunk into the sand. The taste of really good dark chocolate gelato on a hot and humid summer day. The smell of the barbecue at her father’s place up in the Catskills.

She sighed, sloshing around in her nutrient vat.

Somehow, Belynn was here, and she was looking for Jackson.

She was managing to keep herself hidden for the moment. She must have found help in Fargo. But Lilith knew her ultimate goal.

It was time to make things a little more difficult for her before she brought everything to ruin.

Again.

Lilith closed her eyes and reached out to one of her acolytes.

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