Escape from Paradise

Chapter 23: In The World of Pain

Well, this was not supposed to happen, Larry thought lying on the floor of the shuttle which was about to slam into the sun. My world destroyed. My love destroyed. Why can no one understand me? Why does everyone always want more and more and more? Why what they have is never enough?

After listening to Jessie's story, about the first days of Paradise, most of his memories of life in this artificial world returned to him. He remembered the great problem of Paradise – human selfishness and search for greater purpose. Everyone had been happy at the beginning. They praised Larry back then, called him a hero but that changed quickly. Over a few decades, human flaws and appetite emerged. They wanted more. They wanted a greater purpose. The perfect world bored them – it lacked conflict, drama, and challenges. Did they forget how painful these things had been back on Earth?

Soon after the creation of the two worlds, Larry realized that people did not know what they wanted. Even he himself realized that infinite life had its flaws. Once a person experienced everything there was to experience, did everything there was to do, nothing remained. That loss of excitement, loss of the first impressions seemed so unfair.

Amnesia came as the most logical solution. He gifted it to everyone even if they did not ask for it. He gave it even to Diana who had always been against it. With the change, peace and calm came to his world. The peace should have lasted forever, only it did not. All because of William Scorchfield.

Larry remembered most Paradise inhabitants from the first days of his arrival but he couldn't recall William. Where did that devil's spawn come from and what were his true motives? Jessie wanted to get out, that was a very logical wish, but what did William want? Who the hell was he?

Larry's thoughts about hell brought him back to the shuttle where through the front window he saw the literal hell he was about to enter. He had no idea what awaited him at the giant yellow ball, what laws of physics it followed. The sun had been Diana's creation. She had come to Paradise much earlier than Larry. She had also been the main architect of the flat world. Its size and shape after her initial touches have only changed a little – buildings grew and fell, districts rotated and mutated, the weather became warmer, days sunnier – everything changed to please the gray mass.

The floor got warmer and warmer. Larry's back burned. His skin turned red but it did not crack and no wounds appeared. The annoying tingling increased until it turned into constant pain. Larry did not get up – better get accustomed to pain, find a way to block it, there would be plenty of it on the surface of the sun. Larry coughed and choked. The air heated up, inhaling and exhaling became almost impossible. He imagined himself as being something other than human. He imagined that the pain was an illusion but the imagination bore no fruit because the back boiled and the suffering increased to the extreme. It became impossible to focus. Every thought was torn apart and driven out by pain. Vision, senses, thoughts, everything was pushed away and substituted by throbbing, maddening suffering.

Larry had no sense of the outside, nor of himself for he had become only a consciousness engulfed by a sea of pain. Was he on the shuttle or on the surface of the sun? He no longer knew. Time ceased to exist – it turned to a never-ending moment of overwhelming suffering. He screamed but his sound vanished before he could hear it. He attempted to breathe but all that came and left his insides were flames. He wished he could cease to exist. He wished he would disappear. He wished he could die.

At times he flew up and at times he fell down. Sometimes, when the pain became bearable for a brief moment he would regain awareness of the world around him and realizes where he was – floating, bouncing and thrown around by the waves of a flame sea. Whenever the brief conscious moments came, he attempted to block the incoming pain but always failed. All his attempts were nothing more than building of a five-millimeter thick glass wall to stop a speeding train. If he would have had the time he could have thickened the wall but all he ever got were only three seconds at most. One second was always spent to realize who and where he was. Second he used to recall all the failed attempts and the third second he used to attempt something new. Something new always failed.

Larry's time sense disappeared. For him, it seemed, that the pain lasted forever. "No escape," he concluded. "Impossible to escape. The whores had achieved what they wanted. They threw me into the prison. Damn them! I did not deserve this. Nobody deserves such fate. If ever get out of here they will pay. Oh, by God, they will pay!"

Suddenly the anger expanded out of him as the light out of an exploding star. It diminished pain and suffering, it blotted out the other thoughts. It overwhelmed everything in his awareness. Where infinite anger remained, everything else disappeared.

He fed the raging monster that had awoken inside him, "I give humanity a new, better home and that's how they treat me. I do everything in my power, spend my whole damn life on this place and this is what they think I deserve? Damned fools. Damned fools."

He became conscious of the yellow ground underneath his feet of the ocean of fire stretching to all directions around him. Bright red liquid boiled, streamed and danced by him, it rolled into waves and leaped as high as the largest buildings in Paradise, perhaps even higher. The waves fell and in their spot new waves rose. Larry realized that he had been only a leaf floating in the violent stream. Rage had turned him into a rock. He clung to it. It was a terrible but controllable emotion, much better than the pain. He used half of his concentration on Jessie and the things he would do to her and the other half he spent on observation and thinking of a way out.

The problem was not the fact that he wouldn't be able to breathe in space – he was not breathing here either. The problem was the great distance and no vehicle within his reach. He could not just kick away from the ground and fly into Paradise. Even if he could, what if he would miss? What if he passed it by and then entered the endless darkness? He needed a vehicle. When he attempted to bend the liquids around him, they did not succumb to his will. Larry almost understood and sensed how the matter in Paradise worked but here the liquids followed another laws, alien laws created by a person of a different mindset. No matter how much he wished to twist or solidify the lava, it refused to. He could sense the frequencies inside the lava but his mind failed to find the tune which would control them. His only hope of getting out was finding the machine with which he came.

Larry found it difficult to fuel hate. Without the physical subject to focus, his mind easily wondered away from Jessie, William, Diana, and all the other fools. It was a matter of time before he lost concentration and became a burning victim once again. He had to do something and do it quickly.

He looked to the sky and could not believe his eyes. One of the flame tongues above his head spat the shuttle and sent it flying into a wave of boiling red. The shuttle floated on the wave rising and falling, rising and falling until it flew up and dove down. Larry had the target in his sight and did not let go. Memories of Diana waving her hand resurfaced, memories of Jessie's lies flooded his mind. He became stronger, faster. He sped through the liquid as if it would have been made of smoke – it had no impact on Larry's movements whatsoever. After cutting a distance of three kilometers in a matter of seconds, he leaped into the sky and pushed the shuttle out of the sea into the sky and then into space. In his hands, the touch of the common matter was the same as a handful of fresh water to a starving man.

He slipped into its hot insides through the bottom with an ease of a man slipping into an oversized shirt. Larry did not even bother turning on the control computer. The machine became an extension of himself. It moved where his mind moved and now it moved further into space, to the direction of the two worlds only he still had to pick one of them as his destination.