The Core: The Dark Enemy

31. The Ouroboros Effect

I had never died before.

Well, wait... that wasn't true. I guess I could say that I "physically" died when I was initially uploaded into the Tela's system and placed in a Personal Live Matrix. So, I had physically died but not mentally.

At this point though, stuff like that just seemed novel, like getting into a car and driving somewhere. My mind had been transported so many times to different places and into different bodies, both in the Haoolla Defender game and this drone body, that as long as my mind stayed the same, I still felt alive and could press on like normal.

So... I don't know if what I was experiencing now would be called death.

The moment that the beam reached my physical body, I was instantly severed from my personal space and taken to a sensory heaven and hell.

Yup, both places at once, and as far as I could tell...

I was still alive.

At least, some version of me was.

But here, in this place... everything felt disjointed. My vision was warped, an endless cascade of colors that shouldn't exist, folding in on themselves in a slow spiral. The horizon was everywhere and nowhere, a constant curve that never bent the same way twice. I saw a place that looked like a world of melting pointing fingers, but then it twisted into a view of me flying through caverns of heart-like organs, then shattered into shards of bubbling glass, each with a different image and angle shown, all without making a sound.

Sometimes, like a child had found the volume dial—everything made sound. Deafening bursts or low vibrations of what could only be described as patterns of noise. No melody, no rhythm—just the scream or hum of something impossibly old vibrating in the air, followed by sudden crashes, like waves hitting a beach that wasn't really there. It was... oppressive, but fascinating.

Light pulsed at the edges of my vision, forcing my eyes shut as though the brilliance of a new star had been born directly in front of me. Yet, sometimes when I opened them again, it was total darkness, like everything had ended. It was the kind of black that makes you think you've gone blind or been swallowed alive. But just as I thought my vision had been broken, fragments of light exploded, as if galaxies were being born and dying in the span of seconds, right in front of me.

I floated, unable to feel my feet—or was I sinking? Gravity seemed to change every second, pulling me in different directions like some unseen force was toying with me. At one moment, I felt impossibly heavy, the weight of worlds crushing my bones. In the next, I was weightless, like I was suspended in an oily soup... only there was no liquid around me and the effect of weight was in my mind and spirit.

Smell was another thing entirely. I knew I wasn't breathing, yet somehow my mind thought I could. One breath would be thick with sweetness, a sickeningly sweet scent that made me think of overripe fruit about to rot. The next? Something metallic, like iron, or blood with worms wiggling in it. It stung my nose, but then drifted away like smoke turning sweet like a grandmother's pie. There was a rhythm to it, almost like a breeze, except... there was no wind here.

And I was cold. Not a physical cold, but a deep, unsettling kind of chill. A dread that seeped into my mind and twisted there, like the memory of a nightmare I couldn't quite forget. Like running down a hallway in the near dark to get away from someone chasing me.

It was too much.

I tried—really tried—to escape to VR or my personal space. I tried to feel out my swarm, to send my mind away to visit the Six even. But every attempt to access what I once had was met with a dead silence, like a door slammed shut. The more I tried, the more distant it felt, until the hope of returning to it vanished entirely.