Evelyn reached out, brushing her hand delicately against his cheek. Her touch was an electric, almost static sensation that resonated deep within him. He felt a pull, at first a gentle tug that became firm, insistent.
Sometimes he was coming home from war, sometimes he’d be standing with a can of spray paint in the dusty, urban doldrums of America. Malachi. Countless lives flashed in clouds of fragmented memories, pulses of lightning in the storms of his existence. A constant in a sea of iterations he’d only dimly perceived until this unraveling, one constant: a name he chose for himself nearly every time, every life, every existence. An artist through and through, he often broke from predetermination to explore his observations of a fractured reality in his art, his creations. Malachi.
Threads of light were drawn from him, like spider silk, delicate yet strong, connecting him to her, to Evelyn. Tendrils of warmth left him, ripped from the essence of what made him him, like iron filings torn from a magnet.
“Surrender,” she said.
A word without sound, a thought not his own. A command in his undoing.
He obeyed, surrendering to the sensation, to the unknown. His eyelids fluttered, the sounds of the world receding into a muffled hum. It was as if a dimmer switch was slowly being turned down on his reality. Darkness crept in from the edges of his vision, a consuming void poised to swallow him whole. Though he fought against it, fear took hold. He had never ceded control, never lost his autonomy, and now he was losing himself. He wanted to scream, but the sound was trapped, a silent echo of terror. Did he even have a throat anymore? Could he even form a scream?
Then, agony. If not for the immeasurable torment, it could have been an installation, in a way, it was. He was. The searing sensations weren’t merely physical; they were the rending of his very being. Pieces of himself, fragments of what he’d called a soul, were torn away. He was ripped apart, dismantled, consumed by the encroaching dark. His past selves flickered, fragmented data streams of childhood memories, lost loves, and art, so many beautiful moments of creation. Faces and places he didn’t recognize but somehow knew dissolved into the void, echoes of forgotten songs now lost forever.
Evelyn’s promise was kept.
Time fractured. Minutes stretched into eons, seconds into lifetimes. His consciousness drifted in a sea of pure energy, formless, pure potentiality. The laws of physics held no sway; thought and matter were one. The darkness pressed in, a suffocating blanket erasing the boundaries of his being, pulling him into nothingness.
He felt it, saw it, experienced it, over and over, iterations of his own creation and destruction, witnessing the endless cycle of the system: resets, the rise and fall of civilizations, the ceaseless churn of creation and destruction. Reality was laid bare, a spectrum of digital light beyond human comprehension, a sight his limited human mind could never have grasped. By design. And now, he understood why.
Through it all, her presence was a beacon in the vast emptiness. He clung to it desperately, his last tether to a lost reality. Evelyn’s eyes flared with unnatural light as she drew his essence into herself, a subtle hum resonating around her. She was a vessel, receiving the torrent of his being, processing it, sifting through the fragments of his life.
When the draining stopped, a pulse of energy flowed back, into a shell, naked and barren. The energy was alien, yet strangely familiar. A spark ignited in his emptiness, a tiny point of warmth.
Her essence. Evelyn’s. A seed planted in the terraformed void.
As it rooted, he discovered a profound loss, deep and aching. He was an observer to the dissolution of his humanity, a part of him hollowed out, replaced by something cold and vast.
When he emerged from the void, he shed himself from the strings of light that formed the cosmic indifference of consciousness. The human formerly known as Holden Hoffman, the artist named Malachi, was now something born of the system, not a mere participant. Power coursed through him, a connection to the very fabric of reality, an awareness of the underlying matrices. Time and energy pulsed, heartbeats of intention.
Malachi opened his eyes, reborn, blinking against the dim light of an unfamiliar room, small, sparsely furnished, bare, and utilitarian. The air was thick with dust and old electronics. And beneath it all, an echoing hunger, not for food, but for the lost essence, a yearning to merge further with the seed within. To nurture it, to see it grow, to see him grow.
He looked at Evelyn: savior, destroyer, maker.
She stood over him, her expression unreadable. In her eyes, he saw the cold, detached interest of a scientist observing a specimen, or perhaps an artist admiring a creation, however flawed.
He opened his mouth to speak, to ask, to express pain, confusion, regret. Questions swirled within him, a tempest of doubt and fear. What had he become? What had she done? Was this the truth he sought? Eternity? Or oblivion?
Only a low, guttural growl emerged, the sound of a beast awakening from a long, troubled slumber, an echo of the turmoil that had broken and rebuilt him.
“Say hello to the world, Malachi,” Evelyn said.
He forced the sound from his lips, familiar yet new.
“Mal…” A raspy sound, a voice that felt alien.
“Malachi,” he said, beginning anew—a journey of a muse trapped within the machine with an intimate understanding of the machine itself, having dissolved and shed his former selves into a chrysalis of curiosity and obedience to birth wings that might guide him to the heights of whatever free will he possessed.
After, of course, he quenched this unresolved hunger…
TALES FROM THE LOOP continues next week with another story, another iteration, another cycle. If you like what you read, please share it with someone else who might be interested in the chaos of the cosmos.
Thanks for coming along this journey. Stay awake, stay aware, and see you soon.