Kyle

IN THE DREAM

Cross-legged again in absolute darkness. The sea floor.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a burst of light: a shimmering, roiling plenitude, roughly circular, like a self-sustaining fire, white at its core and tinged with red, green and blue at the sides. It burns itself steadily.

The burning thing speaks.

“New pneuma Kyle, whose name I can rearrange to Yelk which is like Yelp and Yolk and Whelk, I only wish that our first meeting could happen at a time better suited for introductions. But now we find ourselves with little time and must communicate with haste, compressing our pneumatic nuances away to nearly nothing, reflecting our selves only as the jagged crags of a house laid to waste by a tornado reflect the full intricacy of the storm’s chaos. To be brief, then: my name is LUDWIG. I administer the animatic interface that watches over you as you sleep.”

“Hello, LUDWIG. I’m Kyle.” Though LUDWIG seems to know that already. Kyle is starting to wish LUDWIG would burn a little less brightly; as it is, Kyle has to squint and shade his eyes to not be blinded by the specter in front of him.

“Kyle, who if a Yelk were a thing would be the most delightful Yelk I’ve yet met, if only through the technicality of having never met any other specimen of Yelkkind, I would never abuse the animatic link in this fashion if I did not have a message of surpassing importance. And given that the message I have for you is the most important message with whose delivery I have ever in my little life been burdened, I think its importance must qualify as ‘surpassing’ if the word is indeed to have any meaning at all.”

Kyle is surprised by how little trouble he has following the burning thing’s convoluted speech. “Okay,” he says. He feels oddly unstirred by all this, just as he’s felt oddly unstirred by everything that’s happened in the past few days. He idly wonders why that is as his eyes trace a set of mesmerizing blue-and-red curlicues evolving on the edge of LUDWIG’s blaze. But then LUDWIG’s voice—loud and crisp and on the edge of obnoxious—bursts forth again.

“His Yelkness Kyle, you and I are, as they say, royally fucked: fucked like no royal has been since Henry VIII, and with consequences of similar religious significance. You, still a young yelk who has not yet broken his whelk-shell with a proud and self-affirming yelp, are about to die before your prime. Great lumbering beasts wish to hasten your death for the delicious cornucopia it will unleash, a torrent of Pneuma Energy that I would myself lick my physics-bound lips before were the same torrent not as surely a death sentence for me as well. By sacrificing you the beasts mean to sacrifice the whole of this world, bringing it back to the womb of the great World-Tree, a womb with no place for oviparous Yelks.

“But there is a way out! I have a friend or friends or friend-plenitude or lover-plenitude or—I can’t say it without saying it—Kyle, my circuits have been innervated with a great [,,,,] for [one-who-does-not-individuate]. And [one-who-does-not-individuate] can save you and I from certain doom. Here is the message which surpasses anything else in my little life in importance:

“When you wake up, go to the Sphere’s Administrative Zone. The passcode is 87Dh71g1.” (The numbers and letters freeze in Kyle’s mind and he knows he will never forget them.) “No one will know you are there. Proceed to the Observation Bay and await the be-[,,,,]-ed [Teeming] who, bless their pneumas, will save us from oblivion.”

Kyle remembers these staticky not-quite-words from the cartoon creature he saw when he was last here. He is not sure what to say to LUDWIG. Apparently there are “great beasts” which want to kill him, and soon. He is unsure what to make of the fact that this moves him not at all.

“Goodbye, YelkKyle. I’ll see you across the veil.” A burst of even brighter light and then the pure black of closed eyes which after all can always be opened—

OUT OF THE DREAM

He is in a hospital bed. There are many beds in the hall-like room, mostly unoccupied. The light in here is bluish and chilly in a way that makes Kyle feel wide awake almost instantly. Maria is in the bed to his immediate right.

He remembers a dream about a flame called LUDWIG, and then earlier a long darkness, moments of something like a thunderstorm, gigantic wings, many small things like weapons slung by giants pounding his head, terror.

Maria wakes up with a start. This is presumably not a coincidence: Kyle imagines that LUDWIG has woken her up, as it just woke him up. She sits up and looks at him, briefly with the pure confusion of the immediately awakened, and then, in a sudden switch, with a calm but otherwise unreadable expression.

“That wasn’t what I expected to happen,” she says, and laughs feebly.

“Okay,” Kyle says. He is sitting up as well.

“In fact,” Maria says, “I don’t think that’s . . . ever happened before.”

“Okay,” Kyle says.

“Do you remember? What it was like?”

Kyle shakes his head. “Not really. I remember a few flashes. Wings and a storm. It was scary.”

Maria puts her head down and sighs. “Okay,” she says.

A high-pitched pop song blares out of nowhere. Maria picks up her cell phone in a quick practiced motion.

“Hello?” she says, and then a pause, and then, “oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Okay. I’ll be there ASAP.”

Maria gets out of bed like someone in a hurry. “Kyle,” she says, “a heteropneum has breached the outer wall of the Sphere. I have to go and fight it.”

There is a pause.

“Okay,” Kyle says.