Voidforce

Chapter One

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But what about the screams here on Earth? An obvious, almost banal question, I know. But I believe it is justified, for the vacuum of space has come to us—or something even more unfathomable than it.

I look up at the night sky and realize that I don't understand anything: neither our stars and the planets that orbit them, the galaxies and nebulae, nor the vast space surrounding it all—space.

Then I look down at my feet, half of which are stuck in the sand. I turn my head to the side and recognize my footprints in the sand, shimmering slightly in the ivory glow of the moon. They seem to be trying to convince me of my existence. They seem to tell me: "Yes, these are your footprints. You walked here. So, you exist!" I bend down and reach into the sand. I slowly open my hand clenched into a fist and let the sand gradually trickle down. I watch the individual grains of sand fall to the ground and merge, becoming one with millions and millions of other grains of sand that together form this beach. Every grain of sand is a part of it, yet as soon as it mixes with its countless siblings, it becomes invisible. It is swallowed up by a mass that makes the single grain of sand disappear entirely. This inevitably makes me think of us humans, and a song line comes to mind:

“All we are is dust in the wind.”

We are all just dust. At least we are stardust—and this thought is somehow comforting.

I look up at a night sky full of stars. A black and blue canvas littered with fantastic sparkle. The sparkle of life. The sparkle of death. The sparkle of time. Can there be time without life?

What is the meaning of time if no life can trickle away on the falling grains of sand off its eternal hourglass? Do I exist only to be able to ask myself questions like these? The silent question remains without an answer, and I close my eyes.

The glow of the stars seems to be burned into my eyeballs. Despite my closed eyelids, I can see the stars as if I were looking straight at them with open eyes. All at once, I notice how the points of light begin to dance against the darkness of my closed eyelids. They attract each other. It seems like a game that the stars play cheerfully: Merrily, they dance towards each other and merge. Small stars merge into larger ones; these merge with siblings of similar size into even larger stars until only a few brightly shining points remain. These also attract each other. After a few moments, all the points have merged into one giant, glowing star that shines brighter than a thousand suns.

All darkness is now gone, and not only my field of vision but my whole body, my whole being, is flooded with light. I feel. I feel life and my connection to it. I feel how everything is connected. And that, my friends, is relevant.

I am aware that I am addressing these words to the stars.

I do not expect an answer.

The gates of perception are wide open.

Open. I follow the silent command and open my eyes. Immediately, the light that seemed to be burning into my eyeballs a moment ago is washed away by the black of night. Then my field of vision begins to flicker. Light gradually takes the place of darkness. Little by little, the stars claim their rightful place in the night firmament.

But the old stars are no longer the same. They, too, now begin to dance. They, too, attract each other. They, too, merge. The difference is that while the stars before only shone splendidly when they merged with each other, these stars create nothing. After a short time, all stars have disappeared, and I stare into a gigantic emptiness. I know what the void means. I know what it stands for. My light is gone, leaving only darkness. How pathetic that sounds! How ridiculously self-pitying! It doesn't matter. Nothing matters at all anymore! The fading stars take their toll. The void is calling me. I obey and rid myself of every emotion. I empty the cache of my memory; I let go of every wish and even the remotest idea of every feeling I've ever known. It works. I know it is a contradiction, but beyond the sensations, something stirs, there I feel something that I have not felt for years, that I have, perhaps, never felt in my life: Liberation!

I open my eyes and notice my feet are no longer touching the ground. I look down and see that the beach is already a few feet below me.

I take a step into the night, and the air carries me. I take another step, and it lifts me far into the air. I run, jump, and dance across the night sky. I know it is an illusion. It may not be true, but it is real. In this moment it is real, the moment itself is real and all my senses get involved to make it perfect. On and on I dance toward the stars that are no more, toward the void that is calling me, that is drawing me in, like a black hole of life. Someone whispers to me:

The blank nothingness stares at me

I wonder if human I still can be?

A dark veil now covers the world around me, and I feel my senses fading. It is as if I am caught in a stranglehold that cuts off the blood supply to my brain and causes me to lose consciousness slowly but surely. As I realize this, panic seizes me. I must fight it, but I can't; I am paralyzed. I want to lash out, kick, scream, but I hang uselessly in space, like a discarded puppet that its puppeteer has rejected. I rip my mouth open with all my might to scream at the top of my lungs, but only silence escapes from my throat. I revolt one last time, blink wildly and tear my eyes wide open.

Then I see ...

“Here comes another.”

I glance up and see Jason nod to the end of the hallway. I don’t bother turning around. I know the sight that awaits me. Instead of following Jason's gesture, I wonder how that man that I adored so much for his vitality and inquisitiveness has changed over the last two years or so. By now, Jason's voice doesn’t carry the lively musicality it used to do before the voidorbs started appearing. It's as if the void has drained all life from his voice's deep, growling bass-baritone that I loved so much. Now one can only hear the monotonous sound of surrender when Jason speaks. And I don't mean the enlightened, untethered Buddhist kind of surrender, but the very earthly one that comes from desperation, from the inability to care. It's sad to lose that bite and that voice, but I can't blame him. How could I?

They roll her by in a wheelchair. A woman, perhaps in her mid-30s, who must once have been beautiful. As she is wheeled past, the term "Yamato Nadeshiko" comes to mind. In fact, I can imagine that the woman must have once conformed to the Japanese ideal of beauty— pale skin, pretty face, graceful posture, finely dressed and all—although it takes some imagination to picture it. Now the beauty is hidden behind a mask of eyes dilated with terror, gazing lifelessly into an invisible abyss. Her pupils are as black and large as if buttons had been removed from Humphrey Bogart's trench coat and inserted into the woman's eye sockets. Her mouth is wide open, forming a soundless scream reminiscent of the famous Munch painting. It is precisely because of this painting that we affectionately (or mockingly) call the silent screamers "Munchies" (pronounced like our relatives from the ape kingdom, not like the snack).

She-Munchie rolls by, and I cannot even pretend to be shocked anymore.

Isn’t it ironic? We are born screaming. It’s the first sound we humans utter as we are thrust into this world. For way too many people, it will be their last. However, whereas a newborn's scream is a piercing utterance of life, the Munchies’ scream is a silent scream of death. A slow death wrapped into a pure void, a blank state of mind without awareness … or so, we think.

When the phenomena known as The Voidorbs began to appear, people were overflowing with speculation about their origin. Naturally, many people reckoned with a non-terrestrial origin of the orbs, a theory that was appropriately fueled by many media outlets. What were they? Extraterrestrial communication devices? Possibly even life forms from outer space? Of course, not everyone bought the alien story. Some of the more skeptical members of my species simply thought the orbs were a fraud, nothing more than a well-crafted hoax. And then, of course, there were those who thought the phenomenon was a conspiracy. Who exactly had conspired against whom for what purpose remained somewhat vague —sometimes it was the G7, sometimes individual states or companies, then again secret lodges that had joined forces to place the orbs over our cities within the framework of covert operations. The conspiracy theorists could not quite explain what the alleged conspirators wanted to achieve by this. Nor could they explain why the orbs appeared over major cities around the globe, from Toronto to Mexico City to Buenos Aires. From Los Angeles to Lagos, from Calcutta to Chongqing ... No state with major population centers was orb-free, whether it was an industrialized nation, an emerging economy, or a Third World country. The orbs seemed to care little about our borders, our power games, or our hierarchies.

In all the hubbub, science struggled to develop convincing theories about the origin of the "anomalies." This was due to the contradictory properties of the orbs. The orbs themselves possessed neither detectable matter nor energy and were capable of forming a perfect vacuum. According to the scientific consensus that prevailed until then, this state should not have existed since even the closest state to a perfect vacuum—the quantum vacuum—still contains a minimum amount of energy. Were the orbs proof of the existence of the perfect void, of absolute nothingness?

Dozens of measurements in the center of the orbs—the voidcore—seemed to confirm this theory because they were all inconclusive: all devices or people entering a core disappeared. Where there is nothing, nothing can exist. And from the nothing, only the nothing can arise. Ex nihilo nihil fit. But is that true?

The old saying that nothing can arise from nothing is turned on its head by the orbs. It actually seems to be the case that absolutely nothing exists inside the orbs, but something can arise from this nothing, which then exists outside this nothing. What sounds like an insoluble contradiction to me and probably to most of my fellow human beings—that something can arise from nothing—seems to be a perfectly acceptable statement to most astronomers and quantum physicists. I do belong to neither tribe, and so the whole idea remains rather mind-boggling to me.

Speaking of mind-boggling: as if all this weren't unbelievable enough, the orbs also drastically affect us humans (apart from the existence-denying conditions inside the core). Despite the apparent nothingness they are made of, the orbs interact with our consciousness. Why and how exactly they do so is a matter of debate among scientists and laypeople alike.

According to a recently popularized opinion, the orbs could prove that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. A theory that until recently was not exactly part of the scientific mainstream.

But what is consciousness if it is not of biological origin?

“Ah…” I exhale and sit down on a bench.

“So, how was Mexico?” Jason wants to know.

"I don't know, Jaz. Beautiful, sad ..." I shrug. "It was good to be back home, but also shocking. The government can't handle the situation there and is focusing its efforts on CDMX and the other major cities. In the chaos, the cartels have seized control of large parts of the country. It is said that La Nueva Familia has even made a deal with the government and taken de facto control of Michoacán, Guerrero and the State of Mexico. The situation is similar in other parts of the country: Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Baja California... The crazy thing is that the cartels seem to be better able to assist the population through disaster relief than the government can. They provide emergency shelters and supply the population with food and medicine. In the process, they not only polish their image, but strengthen their position, recruit new members, and crush anyone who opposes them. The irony of it all is that the people who flee from the orbs fall directly into the hands of the cartels. Many try to get south or to the coast, but of course the cartels control the main connecting routes. If you can't buy your way out, the cartels own you. It's horrible."

“Sounds kinda familiar,“ says Jaz and nods to the man who is standing at the end of the hallway and talking to an officer of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. His arms are covered in Irezumi, Japanese tattoos.

I sigh. “Yakuza, Cartels … What’s the difference?”

“Good time to be in organized crime,” Jaz says.

"Maybe we should change professions?" I suggest.

At least my suggestion puts a little smile on Jaz's face. It lasts only a second. When he looks up at me, I can see the concern in his eyes:

"How is your father?"

"Not good," I say truthfully. "He acts like everything is OK, but it's not. He's drowning the pain in mezcal. I don't blame him, but it breaks my heart to see him drink away what's left of his life. I told him to leave Michoacán. He would find a way to beat the blockades and make his way to Oaxaca. The city and the whole state are still orb-free as far as I know. But he prefers to stay in Morelia. He has a friend who owns a mezcaleria: Rafita, I think I told you about him."

"Oh, the guy who makes his own mezcal? The one you were going to import?"

"That's the one."

"Yeah, I think I even have a bottle left of his Reposado left ... La Truja, right?"

"Wow, you're good."

"Oh, you know. I know my spirits."

That pun makes me smile. Oh, how good it feels to smile. He’s a voidwalker, I think; he must know his spirits—or the abyss of the void would swallow him whole.

“Nani yarooo??”

The angry scream comes from the yakuza at the end of the aisle. He is arguing with the officer, gesticulating wildly and repeatedly uttering an angry staccato of words that resemble guttural grunts rather than intelligible speech. The officer does not seem intimidated by the gangster's posturing and attempted demonstrations of power. Instead, she looks her counterpart straight in the eye and speaks in a loud, self-confident voice without giving in to shouting.

“Dame da!” she says and shakes her head.

The little spectacle repeats itself.

“Dame da!”

This is as many public "no's" as the yakuza can take, so he whirls away like a typhoon, making sure to slam the door as he exits the hallway.

“What was that all about?” Jaz wonders.

I just shrug my shoulders. “Some Mafia powerplay bullshit, I guess.”

“Sumimasen.”

I turn around and see a little girl staring at me with big eyes.

“Boido-waakaa desuka?”

It takes my ear a little while to adjust to the Japanese pronunciation of the English word ‘voidwalker.’

“Un”, I say and nod. I am a voidwalker, I think, and still cannot quite believe the implications of what that means.

The girl smiles shyly as she hands me a magazine. My Japanese is rusty, and my reading ability junior-high-school level at best—all those Kanji said sayonara a long time ago, and God knows where they went—but I still can make out what the title story on the cover of the magazine says:

ヴォイドウォーカーズ

人類の救世主なるか？

Voidwalkers

Will they be the Saviors of Humanity?

At least the editors had the decency to formulate it as a question.

The cover image is a manga version of a photo of me and my squad taken right after the Monterrey mission just over a year ago—the first successful voidwalk, and to date, one of the few successful attempts at first-sphere voidwalking near the core.

I take the magazine and write my first name on the cover. For good measure, I add the Japanese characters for "emerald" behind it.

Esme 緑玉

This makes the girl giggle and clap her hands. “Sugoi, sugoi” she says appreciatively. I give her the magazine back and she grins like a Cheshire cat as she takes the magazine and bows deeply.

I look to Jaz and see him smiling. "Bye," he says as the girl turns and happily runs away, and there's at least a hint of that friendly, deep hum in his voice that I've missed so much. He turns to me and eyes me with a conspiratorial look.

"How does it feel to be a star?"

The question is peppered with sarcasm, but I know he's not actually making fun of me. Jaz may be frustrated, even depressed, but he's not a condescending guy. Besides, he knows I can't stand the publicity and all that celebrity business that comes with being a voidwalker, so I just wave it off.

"Don't believe the hype."

“I don’t, but I kinda want to. I must, in fact. After all, you’re the alpha wolf of our little void-walking wolf pack.”

He is right.

“Esme-sama?”

I turn around to see one of our liaisons, Corporal Fujita.

“Junbi ga totonoimashita,” he says he says and indicates a slight bow.

Jaz looks at me with raised eyebrows.

“They are ready for us.”

I see a shoreless city and how it lies on this plateau, soaked with people and machines, crisscrossed by the neural pathways of modern society: roads, tracks, power grids, telephone lines... I see a blue house, a kitchen with colorful plates and pots, rooms with photographs of an infinitely sad-looking woman; I blink, and I am in another place, in another city, less wild and chaotic, but more exuberant, more excessive. The city's skyscrapers line the horizon like tombstones, and I remember a feeling. A brief shiver runs down my spine, and then I'm with them. I'm in the crowd, and at the same time, I'm looking down at the stream that pours out around me into the streets below in eternal courses. Countless black-spotted dots stream out of subway stations and shopping malls, pouring into streets and over bridges, flowing with and into each other, like ants, following an invisible chemical trail.

I feel the familiar hands in my hair, give myself completely to this feeling, throw myself into the sensation, am now the hand myself, breathe in deeply, smell the scent of the hair and the skin next to me, feel the closeness of the one I love. I glide weightlessly through space, let myself float, see the stingrays swimming below me, see the silvery shining shoal of barracuda to my right, see the moray eel looking grimly out of its cave. You are next to me. You point with your left hand to your forehead and with your right hand into the dark blue, beyond the reef. I know this sign. I follow the indication of your hand, turn my head and see the shark that swims towards us as if from nowhere. It swims right at us, passes and in the next moment has already disappeared again. I laugh and hear the popping of champagne corks, see the happy faces, the dancing people. I groan. Sweat runs down my back, I groan as I push my pelvis forward one last time before the twitch runs through my body. I see my own reflection in your tears. I scream. Crying, I clutch the body that hangs lifeless in my arms. The hand hits the table flat, and I can still clearly hear the word ‘enough’. I board the ship and in the next moment I am walking alone over wide grassy hills, laughing at the campfire with newly won people who soon leave me again... Nothing but ashes and dust remain at the fireplace at dawn. Deeply I breathe in the morning air. I see a valley through which strides a giant creature, on whose back a lush forest grows. There in this forest, people and animals live peacefully side by side. I exhale. The creature lies flat on its belly, its coat of forest and green cleared, dark blood oozing from the stumps that were once its arms and legs. There is no trace of man or beast. I look up and see the crystal spire of the tower stretching high into the sky before my feet, seeming to touch the clouds. I squint my eyes and now stand in the glass spire, gazing silently into the lifeless steppe that lies before me. An invisible rope pulls at me, driving me—through the glass—towards the abyss. I push against it and know it is in vain. A man without a face stands in a shadowy tower without windows or doors, turning a steering wheel. Countless invisible threads go away from the wheel, or towards it, stretching out from the center of the tower into the world... The man without a face turns the wheel and I fall into the depth.

When I open my eyes, I see a fox grinning at me and saying to me "follow me!" I follow the fox through a city without people, to a place where the orbs are glowing. The fox jumps. I jump after it and find myself in the middle of a dark alley, in another time, in another place. A child stands in front of me, reaches into his pocket and throws a marble right at my feet. Another marble comes rolling in from nowhere and merges with the marble at my feet, which now begins to glow. More and more children come running up and throw marbles through the alley, which is soon bathed in a bright light.

All eyes are now on us.

With my eyes closed, I look at the man lying on his deathbed in front of me. Cables hang from him and extend away from him into apparatuses that seem futuristic to me and yet look familiar.

I feel the familiar pressure on my shoulder and follow my friend out of the room. I look into his eyes, see the inquisitive glint in them. And we talk. We talk and tell each other stories, across continents and ages ... Standing at counters, sitting around campfires, dwelling in satellites circling the earth. Then I fall asleep, and with me the world. In the dream, I see mankind sleeping, see whole cities and peoples doze in slumber, see humans, who hardly resemble humans anymore, see old men who become young men, see machines and humans which are one and the same, a human-machine interwoven to an earth-spanning net. I eavesdrop on people who speak to each other soundlessly, who look blindly into each other's eyes and caress each other without touching. Silently and without saying a word, I scream: Stop!

I am out of my mind. I see everything, hear everything, feel, taste and smell everything simultaneously. I feel every memory and every pain I had ever felt, feel the suffering of all people as my suffering, their happiness as my happiness. Connected to all, I nevertheless float alone in the center, hanging weightless and lonely in a vacuum. I am the smallest point of existence. And yet this point is all that I have, all that I am. As I become aware of this, I stop breathing. I gradually become transparent and finally dissolve.

And the world around me is dark.

“Esme?”

The voice sounds distorted, like words spoken underwater.

“Esmeralda, are you with me?”

I see Jaz's face as if through a veil. It is blurred, and its contours flicker in my field of vision like a dancing spirit. The words I hear don't match the movements of his mouth. You know this game, I tell myself. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. When I open my eyelids again, the veil lifts and Jason's words gradually match the movements of his mouth..

“Another flashback?”

I nod.

“What did I miss?“

“Not much,” he whispers. “We are to retrieve a dog!”

“A dog?”

“A dog indeed. An imperial dog, for that matter. It got lost in the chaos of evacuating the Imperial Palace. His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince, believes the dog is still alive. He has seen him in his dreams multiple times. That’s a divine sign, of course. It’s a hundred million extra if we retrieve the dog.”

"Hmm." A hundred million yen would be worth looking for a stray.

“There’s more,” Jaz ads. “Artifacts, national treasures ...”

"Ah, yes," The moment he mentions them, I remember the slides showing artifacts. Suddenly, it's clear in my mind's eye: The last thing I saw before the flashback took my consciousness on an impromptu daydream ride was the image of a sword stand.

"What about the others?"

"Have just landed in Narita. We'll have to meet them on site. An army helicopter will take them directly to the entrance at Daikanyama, to the edge of Sphere 3."

"What else?" I say, nodding forward to where Lieutenant Mori is giving her presentation.

"She's giving us the latest on Void research. Could be interesting."

"... This has led Professor Clara Herlo to no longer rule out the possibility that the anomaly could indicate that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe."

"How so?" I ask.

"Well, I'm no expert on cosmology or quantum physics, but if I understand Professor Herlo correctly, her interpretation is that if the orbs do indeed represent absolutely empty space interacting with consciousness, it could mean that space itself is conscious. This, in turn, suggests that consciousness might be a fundamental condition underlying everything, giving rise to everything."

As if Commander Mori had read my mind she adds:

"Unfortunately, these conclusions are rather philosophical in nature. They may tell us something about the nature of the universe, but we cannot yet derive any measures for dealing with the orbs and their possible control."

"Cheers" says Jaz, his voice spiced with sarcasm.

"This brings us to mission safety. Remember: As soon as you cross the Tama river non-specific side effects such as nausea, dizziness or confusion are possible. However, with the entry into the third sphere, the effects on your consciousness will increase all at once; first, old memories will resurface, things you thought you had already forgotten. Dreams and things hidden in your subconscious will come to light. You will experience synesthetic effects ... Colors will become sounds, sounds will become shapes... it will be confusing. The effect on your consciousness will be greater the closer you get to the core. Don't forget that the voidorbs emit currents: If a current of consciousness hits on you, don't resist it. It is like an ocean current—don't fight it, let it take you and swim with it, not against it. Surrender to the currents of consciousness, let them inspire you, be creative with them, and then build the world you experience as you experience it, like a lucid dream."

Lieutenant Commander Mori was right, of course: the secret to voidwalking was creativity.

"Oh, and one more word of warning. Your mission has caused some resentment among the Ultranationalists. They exerted their political influence and arranged for the Imperial House to approve another salvage mission and to order the Yurei Battalion to launch a parallel rescue operation. They will start off from the north, out of the Yasukuni Shrine area. They will receive support from the Sumiyoshi Kai, which controls this district, and I don't think I need to explain that although, they have the same goal as you, they will not be sympathetic to you. Therefore, contact with the Yurei Battalion is to be avoided at all costs."

Terrific, a private army sponsored by the Ultranationalists and Yakuza is competing against us in a race that will likely cost us our lives—or at least our minds. It could hardly get any better.

"This is going to be fun," Jaz says in a happy grumbling tone.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry, so I look at Jason put my hands to my cheeks and imitate a silent scream.

"Ok, Munchie," he says, "let's voidwalk!"

* * *