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Chapter 1 Truth—a hurricane There is no hiding from it This is not my storm . . . Switch. He is now in a body of a military scientist. He feels her anxiety, her hands tremble as she tries to uplink to her shuttle, but the remoter doesn’t establish connection. The screen is frozen, she taps it––no use. She turns the remoter around to open the lower panel to see if the circuit board is somehow damaged from high humidity. Instead, she sees its serial number. Cold fear twists her guts––they gave her an old-issue remoter; it will never uplink. She starts running. She's running at the top of her speed, praying to get to her shuttle in time. She was so naïve, she scolds, "it's just obstructive sticks and grass," her commanding officer said, dismissing her. They were never going to listen to her even if she filled the whole judicial system with evidence of the planet's intelligent life. And what a magnificent sentient life it is! Back in the forest, a group of tiny winged creatures formed a small golden cloud. They touched her. It was a touch of healing kindness. She felt so much love, there were no words to describe it. An old scar on her hand, an improperly healed bone-fracture, a collection of other injuries from endless combats all healed within moments, in front of her eyes. They let her see their forest-city. It’s simply magical––suspended and interconnected delicate cylindrical pathway, woven out of something silky and luminescent into mind-bending, complex, mathematical patterns, running for miles and miles… She's running out of breath, whizzing. The shuttle is within reach. It's almost dawn. She falls, gets up––a few more steps. Her palm slams against the door, she throws herself inside the shuttle, and crawls toward console. Panting, with barely moving from exhaustion fingers she struggles to connect her remoter––it holds everything she discovered about the species––to the upload unit. "Destination," finally, asks the ship’s AI. She holds her breath, her throat is dry and burning, its muscles spasming: "Every open channel in the universe," she rasps on exhale. Panting again, gulping for air, then steadies her breathing and her voice: "Subject: ‘Ghorhya is annihilating a civilization to open-pit-mine their planet.’ Send and keep the feed live." She gets out of the shuttle, looks into its exterior camera, and waits. The mission is at dawn. It is dawn––she's hopeful. She'd gladly go to jail for this if they only listen to her. She knows she's ruining reputation of all Ghorhyans but she couldn't see it any other way. There is ringing in her ears. Her knees feel week. From the forest, thousands of agonizing thoughts of pain and despair flood her mind. If these magnificent beings had vocal cords, their screams would’ve stripped away the planet's crust. She wants to say this to the camera but she can't move or open her jaws anymore. She cries instead. Her tears and blood are running down her cheeks, falling on her starting to scorch skin of her recently healed hand. She can't hold herself upright anymore and lets her body fall on the ground with a thump. The pain is excruciating. In her mind, she sees magical winged creatures melting one by one in agony. In my next life, her mind pledges, I shall punish each and every one of you–– She doesn't finish her promise. Her brain and body turn into goo. Switch. Locus is now in a white-purple chamber of some humanoid lizards. Everyone’s so tall––he's in the body of a child who just ran into the chamber. His parents are being nailed to the wall limb by limb. He turns away, breathing heavily, getting sick and petrified at the same time. He wants to wail, but his heart becomes too large with pain, stealing space and air from his lungs, stealing his voice. He closes his eyes and asks gods to help him rescue his parents. Agonizing scream of his mother reaches his ears. He turns back to look. A thin, purple device with a metallic lasso enters one of her eyes. The man who works the tool smiles, then rotates it with an unhurried, deliberate motion––the eye's calcified nerves crackle with a sickening sound; its cavity spouts the purple fountain. The man's long, blue tongue snatches the eye from inside the lasso and sends it into his mouth with lightning speed. He eats the eye noisily, then leaks the lasso tool until it's clean. The boy starts running to his parents, but someone catches him by his robe. "Where are the royal parchments?" says another man. "There will be uprising," his father pushes his voice out with effort, then spits out blood and teeth. "You'd wish then to never be born.” His mother moans as she has no strength left to scream. The pain is excruciating, the child knows––the eyes are the most sensitive part of the body. She loses consciousness. His father tries turning his already blind face toward his wife, but an executioner's sword lands on his neck in a blink of an eye, his head, as if in a deliberately slow motion, is falling off his shoulders. The boy’s heart contracts. A powerful wail of anguish breaks out from his small body. He tries to turn away but cannot. Someone's bloody hands are holding his body firmly, holding his head, urging him to watch. The boy’s mind labors to comprehend his parents’ suffering and demise. And, as his heart would always remain small, his bloodthirsty soul pledges revenge––brutal, haunting for generations, revenge. Switch. In the middle of vast courtyard, Locus sees a young man, barely out of his teens, naked. His body is bruised; he’s bearing his weight on one leg, the other is broken; his face, bloody and swollen, is unrecognizable; his head is high. Something is written on his stomach with feces, but Locus cannot read it. The young man’s outstretched arms and legs are tight at the wrists and ankles. Locus follows the ropes––the four ends are fastened to four horses. The horses shift from one leg to another, their riders are whispering something into their ears. The horses snort in anger. They are restless, eager to run––they’ve been in stables for too long, getting prepared for this moment. But the ground-men are holding the beasts down by their bridles. The men's muscles are bulging. Locus tries pushing through the crowd to free his lover, but he can't––he's immobile. Agonized, he labors hard to feel and move his limbs so he could rush to his beloved, seize him in his arms, and run, run run...! But Locus’ consciousness can only watch, it cannot change the past. The executioner lifts a long trumpet to his lips, and feels his lungs with air. He blows. Locus bellows and turns into light-dust. Switch . . . Locus's horrendous recollections invaded his sleep, shamming as his dreams. These were not his memories, but hundreds of thousands of souls’ his body was made up of who remembered. They remembered everything, and they pushed their anguish through a protective membrane of Locus’s Guiding Soul, trying to get out. Soon, these pseudo dreams appeared with increased frequency and without interruption or a chance of waking up at their culmination or conclusion. Engulfing and merciless, they latched onto him like parasites, slowly moving through his souls’ many pasts, exaggerating the most painful moments with grotesque and ruthlessness, as if in some sick stage production. At first, he would witness a thousand of executions from afar; or tortures––through a lock hole or some fluky slit within an impenetrable structure. He'd be far enough not to see details or tortured bodies––unmoving, yet with a whiff of life and consciousness. Then, with a sudden stroke of fate, as if switching to a different set of eyes, Locus would see same executions and tortures in slow motion and up close. The nearness reincarnated the memories of overwhelming stench of excrement, vomit, and blood––its metallic taste lasted in his mind for eternity, it seemed. He fought hard to wake up. It is someone else's reality...snap out, Locus bellowed countless times. But the nightmares kept him a prisoner. Even when he tried altering the dreams just slightly, his truth-seeking consciousness sabotaged his efforts at every turn, restoring the treacherous path of the terror. Next, he attempted at taking control over the body his consciousness occupied, but like a marionette, he was the one who was forced to watch and watch, and watch. And, when he couldn’t take the painful specter any longer, his consciousness, filling to the brim with hot, sickening light, combusted into light-dust or supernova. The explosion would break the pattern—and new recollections commenced right away. As Locus was about to witness more atrocities, he suddenly found himself scrambling away from the event horizon. He got too close. His first impulse was to figure out if it was him, in his own body, and whether he should continue the fight. But self-preservation forced him to throw a quickly concocted antigravitational bolt into the beast's mouth; and, as soon as its pull eased, he dashed out of its grip and into safe space. Locus swore. For a long time. Yes, he was him and in his own body––no any other soul within him swore like he did. The black hole almost got him. That never happened before. He could navigate around and even within event horizon with a masterful precision and never get caught. Not like that. To be fair to himself, he was thrown in that space against his will. Was that how the High Council informed him of new assignments now? Yanking him out of his hibernation and into the battlefield with the black holes? . . .