The Core: The Dark Enemy

16. Month two: Rising through tar

I was lost and stuck again.

Every time prior someone had come to me, pulling me into their mental space with some sort of hook. It had been weeks and I was feeling the serious stress of being stuck in this absence of stimulation... place, if you could call it that, between the two dimensions.

The bright side, if there was one, was that I now had my own mental space to relax in and to think things up inside. Sure, it was missing Nurse and my connection to my swarm and friends, but it was better than nothing. I had vast troves of knowledge to draw from, not my own, but that didn't stop me from trying to use it. Also, I could rest there in between the dark expanse while I attempted to get ahold of one of the seven.

I had tried everything up until this point. I tried mentally yelling to get anyone's attention, sleep experimentation where I dreamed of myself arriving at my destination, and I even tried coding myself some eyeballs to see into the darkness around me but to no avail.

Nothing helped.

I couldn't stop staring at the calendar and the passing days. The more time went by the faster each hour seemed to rush past, leaving me knowing that I was powerless until I broke out or was rescued.

It wore me down.

I started to feel an uprising of sadness inside myself. I had been fighting it off, keeping it at bay with each new idea and plan of escape that I had come up with, but once my lengthy list of ideas had run out the feeling had slowly started to creep into my core.

It started to take on a life of its own. I could feel it, consuming and feeding off of every thought that rushed through my head. It was feasting off of my wonderful memories and things that I was missing out on... and would miss out on. It gorged itself on moments that I would never get back and got fat off of what would happen if I stayed here forever.

It was that last thought, and all the sorrow that swept through me, the images of my dimension, all the people I loved dying if I failed to protect them, that made the feeling inside me warp.

It came alive... as though I had fed it enough or understood it enough to reveal itself.

It became a part of me that seemed to inhale all the joy and life around me.

Like an extra heart beating in reverse.

"You?" A familiar voice spoke softly against my consciousness. It felt odd, as though someone was standing on my front porch and talking at my front door, not like the earlier times when the seven had been able to force their voices into my mind.

In a panic I grabbed mentally at the voice, pulling it into my space so that I wouldn't lose it. Suddenly, a tiny wisp of darkness was floating inside my personal mind space. Whatever it was, I didn't recognize it. It looked nothing like the seven that I had met before. It was tiny and almost paper-thin in its form. It wasn't moving, frozen in the air as though it was in a state of shock.

"Designer? No... you are... the human named Kevin. How can this be?" The tiny creature said as I lifted it up towards my face so that I could see it more clearly. It was odd, an expanse of little fibers extending from a pitch-black sinkhole in its center. I turned it around, just to see if anything was coming out the other side. Where I expected to see a little funnel tube the opposite side was the exact same. An impossible hole sinking into another impossible hole. The little creature was entirely too thin making it the trippiest optical illusion that I had ever seen. With every beat of the sinkhole heart, the fibers seemed to pull at the environment around it, pulling more than just air toward its center. With each tiny beat, the light seemed to dim around it.