Welcome to Gaia! ::

The dream shattered again, and Micah stood before one last door, dazed and reeling in confusion. He'd lived a life, or was it two lives? Three? He didn't understand. He'd been shown something, and he felt too stupid and -- and limited to understand it, and he was helplessly, tiredly angry about that.

He was still dreaming, dreams inside dreams. The green door was hard to look at. It made his stomach twist sickly and his head pound. He wanted to wake up. He couldn't wake up. He would never wake up. As if from a distance, he watched himself step forward and take hold of the door handle to open it.

He shaped his life around working, because working was what you did with your life. Because Dad worked hard, and even if they were poor they still had their pride, and damn if they were going to let anyone else pity them or prop them up, and Micah learned early that you had to earn what you got. He got mad too easy to do cashier jobs, so he washed dishes and he delivered pizza, and when Da got sick he dropped out and lied about his age to get harder jobs, and he'd learned to do useful things. He'd made himself useful to the apartment building when the s**t hit the fan, and he'd been accepted for that and tried as hard as he could not to lose his temper because there weren't enough people or enough safe places to get kicked out. He'd known all along that the end would come, and he tried not to think about what had happened to Da or that wife of his, and he tried not to think about what would happen to all of them.

It had happened at last, and Micah wasn't even sure how much of it had been real, not after he'd gone out into the Zones and gotten hit on the head. The other people at the Apartments were real, he was sure. Crow had been real, Zelda and October and Mr. Nordskov, Fantasia, all the others, the weirdos and misfits who'd banded together to survive, and Micah hadn't really liked all of them but he still felt indebted to them, and he felt sad when he thought about the end, all of them infected and coming to an end.

He was infected. He was dying. Maybe it was better like that, not being messily killed but becoming something else, becoming --

-- becoming other, becoming more than one (plural, the network informed him, that was the word for it), and his body didn't have a mind in it any more --

-- he was the virus, interconnected, what had been Micah being lost in the vast collective mind that was knowledge, that was the legacy of creation. He would create, endlessly, gathering up the knowledge of all the small packages of memories that were wandering around lost, he would add them to himself --



-- he would gather it all up and take in all of it, because --



he was incomplete.

Something tore, and Micah sobbed aloud and didn't hear himself. He was free. He was lost. He was alone, and he didn't even have a body any more. He needed to find his body. He needed to have a body to make himself him, even if it was only for a little while before he had to return to the network, the greenness. Vines curled out of the mass of vegetation around him, willing to help; his memories said that he should look like this, and the vines tried obligingly to make a shape like what he felt ought to be his own.

He staggered clumsily down the corridor of vines, looking for his body. He wasn't even sure why he was looking for it, or what was left of it, because he already wasn't human any more, and he'd have to go back. But he still needed it. He still needed to do this. Maybe it was just the clinging remains of the stubbornness that had been part of what was called Micah, but he didn't want to go back yet, and he wanted to find his body.

He found something. A mass of vines, slowly closing around a body, obscuring a face. It wasn't his face. He recognized the face even so. He'd dreamed about this face, this person. This guy had come to rescue him, to get him out of the city, had hauled his unconscious a** out of the ruins and run down a highway carrying him, done everything possible to try and bring him to safety. And now the vines were eating this guy. No, Micah said, because he owed this guy, owed him something fierce, and he bent clumsily over the bundle of vines and started brushing them aside with hands that were more like paws.

Because he was part of the vines, they listened to him; he promised them something if they'd just let him do this, and they let go of the guy, melting easily away. If this guy wasn't infected yet, he didn't have to be. Micah crouched down and lifted his rescuer in arms made of vines that didn't really look like arms, but were still his, for now.

The vines drew back around him and let him carry the guy, out of the corridor, down the stairs. As Micah stepped down and down and down, concentrating on holding onto the limp form and keeping himself Micah-shaped, it became harder and harder. Moving away from the center made it hard to move at all, so hard. But he owed this guy, and he was going to make good on that.

He was losing himself, leaving vines trailing up away behind him, and the further down he went the less of him was still bundled into a shape. But there was a door there, and figures in the fog outside, and he could see as he pushed the door slowly open that the figures were others who were here to help. He couldn't be helped any more, but his rescuer could. He laid the guy down on the ground, and as the others emerged from the fog to take what Micah had carried, he withdrew inside the building again, because he couldn't stay. He had to go back.

He trudged slowly back up the stairs, gathering his bits and pieces and making himself into a shape again. As he returned to the vines, returned to the corridor, he brushed against other shapes that were made out of vines. They were others like him, still bits of memories that hadn't been all the way absorbed yet. None of them were complete, but for a little while, they still had themselves left, too.