Is a snake's reality any truer than a bat's?

This wasn’t a normal Thursday. A grey and gloomy sheet was blanketing the hill, with etches of violet and blood orange slipping through the trees to the west. She was carefully making her way through the mud and the tangled roots of the heavy, old redwoods of the woodland. The rain that had fallen earlier smelled glorious. She reached the edge, and paused. Looked around with wide, nervous eyes. Moonlight mixed in, casting an eerie pale shadow on the vast compound. Silence..

Her hands were shaking - not from the cold.

She swallowed, closed her eyes.

Took a deep breath.

Okay. Let's go.

She tightened her black jacket, secured her jet black ponytail, and got going. She was no longer protected by the forest’s shadows. She continued briskly, small quick steps, shoulders tight. All six feet of hers a slender wraithlike figure, cutting through shadows. Snow-clad mountains to the east - rugged, majestic towers of granite. The air smelled like stone and burnt wood. The whole area was dull and lifeless, though it was high spring. She sighed. Growing up on the Idaho plains made her value every individual. Every form of life. Flowers, insects, birds - unwilling to do their dance here, though. The only visitor a green, velvety snake, moonlight reflecting on his ominous eyes - looking out of place but oh so appropriate too.

The poor slithery guy couldn’t find anyone to eat, she thought. Or hang out. He sees heat - and all was blue and cold. Except for a flaming red figure moving swiftly towards him - Viktoria. Snakes see in infrared, bats with sonar, dogs with scent. Everyone in their own little slice, their own reality, convinced that their perspective is totally, unalterably true, and all there is.

Is a snake’s reality any truer than a bat’s? She thought, and kept going. Thin, grey street lamps quietly humming, like alien antennae floating on nothingness - only serving to confuse her in the deep fog rolling in. Puddles of water, still, frozen at the edges. Cold, heavy dew slowly dripping from the lamps.

The silence was deafening. No sound but her breath, and the gentle, leathery, tap-tap-tap-tap of her black boots. She reached the barbed wire, ducked, cut open a hole, and crawled through. Stood back up, and exhaled. Every ounce of her breath rose far and wide, dissolving into the blackness. She’d breached the perimeter. There was no turning back.

She took a right and headed towards the building. The biting cold hurt her green eyes and reddened her youthful high cheeks. Presently she reached a white booth, its glass facade cracked, a sign hanging by the seams. STOP HERE. Security.

Right, she thought.

Control inflow and outflow of people, information, artifacts, money. Easier when you have one main artery, one choke point. One main actor. Like oil cartels.

Or Central Banks. That’s why they hate all the hoohah around decentralised, digital, anonymous money.

No one ever liked losing power.

She bent over and peeked inside, her hands cupping the side of her face, on the glass, steaming it with her breath, her thin, almost cruel lips, touching it. Looked trashed. Shards of glass, a broken chair. A computer, a couple monitors, smashed. A dark oak cupboard, overturned.

Her heartbeat accelerated, breathing became shallower. It was game time.

The parking lot was deserted. She closed in, the building’s outline slowly forming in the odorous shadows and drowning fog. It was windowless, save for two small iron-framed windows. Shabby, off-white concrete, with numerous cracks adorning the surface, and black, smokey lines meshing with the white paint. As if a giant had caressed the building, marking it with his lit candle. Barren, cold, rusty - yet, at the same time, it wasn’t.

It was a long, narrow structure, and she was looking at it from the side. She continued walking its length, hunched, and uncertain, but then lifted her head up, breathed in - no, she had to do right by him.

She’d promised. And now Dr Albert needed her. And her word was as inviolable as gluons holding an atom’s core together.

She took a left, keeping the building to her right, and stopped just short of the corner. Her back was tight against the wall, her hands warily touching the cool concrete. She felt an eerie glow from around the corner, warming the air, a pale yellow blending with blue and grey. It smelled like plastic. She paused. A rustling sound, crackling like a palm tree whipped by a mad storm. She craned her head, peeking around the corner, and jerked back. A shopping cart - a metal cage on wheels, whose purpose is to transport humanity’s insatiable consumerism. Only there was no supermarket nearby. And this wasn’t just a shopping cart. It was on fire.

Her shoulders tightened, inching upwards to protect the neck. A tingle flew down her spine. Fight or flight reptilian mode activated. Pupils fully dilated, quickening heartbeat, cold sweat, muscles contracting ready to pounce. She stared at it, frozen. Flames dancing, shouting, consumed it. Its once pale blue metal spine had turned into a charcoal black. The flames were raging - jumping out the cart, spitting orange fireballs in a parabola. A bad sign. They’d left in a hurry. And they may have inadvertently burned the little black book.

She traced several sparkling, stainless steel pipes running vertically on the building’s facade. Up on the roof, three giant smoke stags. Lines of thick wires and cables tracing a path to the gated structure to her right, gutted, protruding from the facade and the lot’s cracked surface like snakes from a high-tech nightmare. A heavy iron door - coarse, black metal around it. Seemed like it would scream if you opened it.. It all led here.

~~

Viktoria walked the perimeter, and found a small basement grill. Bingo. Smashed it with her boots, one shot, bent down to remove it, cast it over, and was momentarily startled by the echoing clanging noise it made. She entered.

Her deep-set, piercing green eyes widened, staring intently around the room. Humans use their eyes to catch photons, of the visible light variety, she thought. That’s how we sense the world. Is our perspective any better than a snake’s? Wiser? That’s a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum, mind you. And these photons - they’re a waste product of the gigantic monstrous thermonuclear explosions fired by the sun. Each photon that makes the 8’ warp-speed journey to earth, has won a titanic struggle to escape the sun’s guts. A 300,000-year-old pinball game of fire.

She blinked a few times, and waited for her animal self to adapt. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the sun’s photons bouncing off the moon, and then faintly again off the room, into her retinas, stimulating her neurons with electrochemical signals, instantaneously translating into shapes, and colours, and understanding. The room smelled of worn leather, dust, and stale coffee. Blades of light were hitting the large, heavy, oak mahogany desk. She found the door, walked to it, and put her ear on it for a second. Just a faint buzz. She turned the handle very slowly - it creaked.

The corridor was cold and white, hostile neon lights lighting the way. The air was cool and damp. Smelled like chlorine. Around the corner a cleaner’s cart, just left there, in the middle, with all its paraphernalia. She walked lightly all the way to the end of the corridor, eyes and ears perked. She almost had a heart attack when she saw her reflection in a glass partition - carelessly brushed black hair, long straight nose, high cheeks, straight and firm jaw line. All black attire. Ready.

She found the maintenance room, and pushed the metal handle down. It bounced up and down. Locked. She turned back and walked to the cleaner’s cart. Yes, here they were. A dozen or so keys hanging loose. She grabbed them and walked back. She spread the keys, picked out the 2-3 most seemingly appropriate ones, and the third one worked. She carefully opened the door.

Rummaging through a million worthless items, there it was. Vik found the little black book sitting there, commanding no attention. Perhaps the most valuable piece of a giant lucrative puzzle, hiding in plain sight. She quickly put it in her pocket, tapped the pocket a couple of times to ensure it hadn’t jumped out, and started retracing her steps. Outta here, fast.

~~

This place was in a small town, middle of nowhere. Supposed to be a sleepy timber factory. As she was driving away towards the drop point, she thought about Dr Albert spending a year in its basement. A high-tech slave, essentially, building out his patent against his will.

If he failed, he’d pay with his life.

And he’d dared to express to the man holding him captive that he was missing his final set of equations. He was lying. He knew exactly where they were.

But Dr A couldn’t, he couldn’t give it to him.

There wasn’t much known about this man - a soft-spoken, highly intelligent man, with pale blue eyes, a stoic manner.

And mad. And dangerous.

The key to room temperature, free, unlimited energy. The holy grail.

Not in the hands of a madman.

Vik agreed.

The hands of the few have ever been controlling the pump of oil, money, and power - but this, this, no, it could not be so.

So he wouldn’t say where the equations were hiding. But Vik knew. And now it was on Vik to retrieve them, and save Dr A’s life - her love for him colliding with her regretful quest to deliver ultimate power to this psychopath.

~~

The blue dawn was starting to pierce through the dark. She reached the gas station, and took a right onto the dirt road. She stopped the car, turned off the ignition.

There they were.

Dr Albert - a medium-height, stocky man, with disheveled brown hair, strong eyebrows, beads of sweat rolling on his forehead, unable to wipe them off. His round brown eyes were tired, impatient, scared. Next to him a tall man with bursting biceps, and a shaved, muscular skull with grey opaque eyes, which, upon seeing her, blazed redly.

Vik gave him the little black book. The leather had trapped a thin layer of dust. The man handled it awkwardly, and gave it sharply with a grunt to Dr Albert. He opened it, ran through it, and for an instant his eyes widened, he faintly jerked back, and slowly looked up at Vik. Their eyes locked. He said “This is it. We’re good”. The tall man then dragged Dr Albert to the car, raising dust in long twisters spinning briefly, like dancers, and then collapsing - echoing the lost moan of nature under stress.

~~

She drove back, dejected, regretful, confused. Dark, heavy eyes, her hair a careless mess. Her phone rang. She fumbled the phone with one hand and wheel with the other, and pressed Yes.

“Hey!” Her kid brother’s smooth and watery voice.

“Hi”.

She passed by a large tract of land, dirt, excavated, a cool, dark hole in mother earth. Ready to be filled with stuff. Concrete, wood, steel, glass. Negative energy transforming into positive mass.

“I sold your car. Commission time!” He giggled awkwardly.

“Right, right, thanks”, she said. “How much you sell it for?”

She too had transformed a negative to a positive. A minus to a plus. In one seemingly random, yet carefully selected, calculation, in a little black book with lots of equations.

“$20,000”, he gleamed. You could see the smile from here.

She paused. “Wow, ehm, thanks”, she said.

A seemingly tiny, yet monumental change. It meant the equations would fail. And Dr A had spotted it. And had looked back at her panicked, yet serene. He’d signed off on it. He couldn’t dare, for the life of him, to give this man the gift and curse of god-like power. And he didn’t.

“I’m coming home. See you soon”, she said, and hang up.