Mindforger

By K.Z. Freeman

Max Byron is the proxy of a living God, and his God hates him. Or so it would seem. Given the power to bend men to his will, Max scours the world and does his master's bidding. He does this because of His words, words Max heard in his mind the day his family was murdered. "I can bring them back."

Max's wish, however, to see his family again, sends his mind racing to find the psychic who had promised to return his family to him. But how does one find a man with a thousand faces? One who is seemingly everywhere and nowhere? How does one find a God?

To do this, Max must enter a different sphere of existence, one that transforms his mind, the world around him, and brings him face to face with truths he couldn't even dream of.

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.Z. Freeman
• Release date: Feb 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466030725

K.Z. Freeman

I love writing fiction. My books are about people - how they can change, and in turn change the world around them.

Book preview

Mindforger

Published by K.Z. Freeman at Smashwords

Mindforger

Book 1

Copyright © 2012 K.Z. Freeman

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-4660-3072-5

http://www.kzfreeman.com

PROLOGUE

I Think, Therefore I Am.

In his dreams, he always dies. He dies and the world lives on. Within the dreams, experiences and moments flash at him with insane speed in a mayhem of images. Emotions accompany the sights, most of them intangible or incomprehensible, filling his visions with sensations – abstractions of strange ecstasy. Then, often times unexpectedly, his mind recedes into a place between bliss and the indefinable, and he dies. He then wakes up in the skin of another, goes through the motions again.

After a few cycles of this, he begins to notice himself as hollow, absent a tangible form, a bare concept leaping from one mind to another, from body to body. Living and dying within each. He ponders this for a while, then looks into his own thoughts. In so doing, his perceptions shatter.

He feels the moment of his own creation. Feels it as surely as one might feel their own hands clasp and fingers coil.

He doesn’t know where or why it happens, and even less about the mechanisms which allowed him to feel things before a brain had even been present. All he knows for certain is that he will die. Perhaps not today, perhaps not even tomorrow, but die he most certainly will. He feels this fate like a vector, a path leading his existence to a singular point in time where he would cease to exist. This point he cannot see, but feels it coming – a storm on the horizon of his existence. He fears it. And that fear drives him, makes him think of how such a thing could be averted. Dread guides his mind before any other emotion even takes root. Then, he notices something else.

Shapes move about him. Specters in the mist of his own thoughts. Time molds itself into a concept he isn’t able to grasp, but one he feels none the less, its passage forging quantum possibilities from which a vibrational structure of matter can emerge. A body.

Pulsing inside his skull, upon the conduits of his mind, new emotions warp and weft.

Feelings became more tangible and numerous as a result, and at the same time less definable, fleeting.

Time drags on.

At one point, the shapes about him vanish and are replaced by a globe swimming in all-encompassing darkness. The globe appears only partially there at first – a mist–thought – then, as time builds layer upon layer in his vision, the orb solidifies into existence beneath him, forming a wet globe. Upon this sphere of crude matter, shapes gather and make war upon one another. To his surprise, it isn’t just the people who wage it either, everything on this… world seems to possess an inherent desire for destruction, a need to feast on something else and make it a part of itself.

I will die on this planet.

Upon the surface of the enormity, minds multiply inside the bellies of creatures both ugly and beautiful. Quantum leaps of minuscule waves alter reality within the pregnant beings and form new patterns. To his amazement, however, he starts to notice something else also exists around these beings, something intangible and all the more subtle, a flame that does not seem to perish, even when the crudeness around which it drifts turns to dust. The creatures seem to ignore this aura as if they cannot even perceive it.

He begins to understand none of these mortals are like him. None had sensed the event of being like him … before it had actually happened. He knows then, that in this, he is unique.

He doesn’t feel anything for what grinds away into an agonizingly long period.

Then comes the heat. Immense, unrelenting heat. A great hydraulic pressure begins to crush him. He experiences it all about him as he descends towards the sphere. He wishes he knew what it was that had sent him on his path.

Valleys and mountains, rivers and trees begin to manifest inside the miasma of his burning vision.

As he falls down through the atmospheric layers and breaks through the cloud cover, he notices one side of the globe encased in darkness. A darkness where uncountable lights blaze and coalesce into webs, polluting the landscape with light, while the other side sits illuminated with energies cast down by a sphere much brighter and much more distant than the one beneath him. He can tell this far–off giant has no mind for the things it scorches.

A barren savanna stretches out beneath him in a flash. He feels nothing of the impact as his trailing form blasts into the soil, nor does he register the fact that he had been splattered into nonexistence and remade. His mind races, and as he levitates from the crater upon the currents of his own will, gazing upon the destruction he had wrought, he knows not to have felt anything was a good thing. What little trees there had been to begin with now laze blackened for miles about the crater’s edge. The earth smokes, the air shimmers with heat.

Charcoal–black and smoldering around him, he tastes the wood on the back of his throat. The stench of it coats his teeth. A sky, blue and welcoming, fills him with warmth, and for a time, simply being, observing, seems enough… so he stands… looks at the sights around him. For a moment, his perceptions drift, change… the earth seems to breathe, and the sun smells too loud.

It takes a time he cannot define for a dozen of dark–skinned and tall, frail–looking men with long, sharpened spears to come to the site where he had fallen. They look even more primitive than he had expected. Yet despite their fear, their stances are proud and their eyes wise, youthful.

The beings speak in careful whispers as they argue and bicker amongst themselves. Their tongues click, their mouths move, hands flail about in semi–elaborate gestures. They do this for a while. The sun sheens off their bronze flesh.

One of them comes closer. An elderly man, his skin dry and hung, his features old yet somehow youthful–looking – gaunt cheeks covered in patches of matted fur. The rest fall silent as the man extends a single hand, the other gripping the lance’s shaft, knuckles white.

Are you a God? the man’s voice shakes.

He looks at the limb at first, the gesture anathema. Instead, he tries to speak – to emulate their language. And as he thinks about forming ideas into sounds they would comprehend, a slither of his thoughts escapes him. His uncertainty manifest into a shockwave of field distortion, a blast only he can see. It bends the air in all directions and unwillingly imposes his own consciousness upon each mind before him. Their skin flays off their flesh as the wall of unrestrained intention made real hits them. Spears shatter or flop to the ground. Someone manages a half–scream. Their knees tremble, and it takes no less than a moment for all of them, to the last, to fall on their faces and die.

CHAPTER 1

To Bring Back The Dead

No one knew his real name, but then again, no one had ever seen him in the flesh either. At least no one who could tell of what they had seen…

Still, they all felt his will, either through his agents, or through the very fabric of possibility which binds together all matter and existence, a fundamental field he was somehow capable of bending to his will. He was the God humanity had been waiting for. An emergent being of a thousand faces and a power no other could rival or subdue.

His physical absence lead many to wonder if the man they knew as the Administrator even existed. Even those who were there to see his one and only broadcast still speculated.

Only one person had come to know the entity dubbed as the Administrator as all too real. But similarly to the Admin himself, few knew his real name either…

It had not always been so, however. The man the Administrator had chosen as his proxy had been born Byron, and his father saw it fit to name him Max. Max Byron. He never liked it, and neither did his mother. But just like Max, she had accepted it, and whether that had been for the love of his father or for the love of her son, Max would never know, he never got the chance to ask. He guessed it had been a bit of both, and perhaps just like the world had accepted a man, or at least what they thought was a man, behind all the strands and webs of human progress, his mother too had accepted Max’s name. He was her son after all. And a name was just a name.

But unlike most, Max still remembered, with painful clarity in fact, the first and only time the Administrator addressed the planet. How could he forget?

It was the day his whole family had died. Murdered even as they still smiled at him, his wife saying, This man is our future. Can’t you feel it? As it turned out, what she felt was her brain imploding.

Max recalled most of that day with perfect clarity. He still dreamt about it. In his dreams, his mind was a thing living, a person to spit curses at for remembering it all so perfectly.

That day, just like everyone else, he had been eager to see the first planetary address of the man who had single–handedly propelled the human race to the stars. The Admin’s advancements in technology and propulsion were been built on paradigms some had considered, but only he had the vision to actualize, to mold them from a conceptual possibility into corporal reality.

In direct result of the man’s genius, humanity had sent countless probes all over the galaxy.

One of them found a world. An industrial world. A world with intelligent life.

We shall travel to this planet, the Admin had said, and Max still recalled the instant love he had felt towards the man. Everyone did, and no one knew why. It seemed none but Max even cared. But love was always a good thing to feel, so, at the time, Max had stopped wondering as well. He had accepted his place as a part of the herd and struggled to move with it. And as the consensus stood, it was either that, or get trampled beneath the hooves of mankind’s progress.

He was there, the day his entire family had gathered in front of the holo–display and watched in awe, comparing who could remember the man's face the longest as He stared down upon them in perfect three–dimensional clarity.

His two young daughters seemed most adept in the task of recollecting. He still had no idea why this had been the case.

The longest Max himself could remember the man’s features, however, had been a few seconds. One moment the man’s face looked old and full of lines, his hair straight and combed, while the next he looked extraordinarily young and fresh–faced, with hair growing in all directions. The Administrator’s low melodic voice would linger in his mind a few moments longer, before its memory vanished as well. Yet the words spoken and their meaning had remained, cemented into his mind. There was nothing like it, and Max fell short in trying to explain how such a thing was even possible. He had ideas, of course, and later heard from others who had not seen the broadcast on some monitor or another, saying, We saw and heard him in our minds.

The thought of such an invasion of privacy would have still made him shiver, if he had not since experienced the sensation for himself.

While his family watched the man explaining when and how they shall travel the stars, Max had torn his eyes away from the man’s gaunt features, only to once again almost instantly forget what he had just been looking at. The face changed each time he looked back. It was like a game to them back then, especially to his daughters, whose enthusiasm had been contagious enough for Max to find himself joining in and become a willing participant. It tickled his brain to do it, and at the time, he enjoyed the sensation. It was good.

His ten year old daughter, Leena, spoke first. To her expanding mind, the game had gotten old fast and she instead gazed at the man for a longer period of time. Her young mind became captivated by the promise of visiting other realms, and her tone reflected it. But what she said had related a whole different spectrum of feelings to Max. Why does it hurt, daddy? she asked.

Never before had she presented a question Max didn’t have an answer too. Or one he couldn’t at least pretend to have an answer to. He allowed himself a blink of an eye to think how best to reply.

Psychic. The word felt foreign to the tongue, as thought the mere idea of it was ridiculous. At the time, however, it was also the only answer which made sense. The Administrator’s a psychic.

Immediately, the six–year–old sitting next to Leena chirped a question of her own, What’s a psychic?

His wife looked at him, a faint smile betraying her eagerness to see how he’ll handle his own entanglement into a web of questions which were sure to follow.

Max’s tongue began to form an answer, he had the explanation all planned out, one which he was certain would make sense even to a six–year–old, when Leena’s eyes rolled backwards. Her nose began to bleed like a broken water–pipe. But instead of grabbing it, she grabbed her ears instead. It became obvious her sense of hearing ruptured something in her mind and violated it with a frequency only she could hear, her face twisted with the intensity of it. His wife screamed. Even now, remembering the pitch of her voice made him sweat in places he never sweated otherwise. Blood gushed out between Leena’s fingers and a shriek no child should utter escaped her gaping mouth. It sounded like what Max had always imagined a dying Banshee would wail like – a piercing cry of total horror as the entity realized it was about to vanish forever. Leena went limp, and Max’s mind with her. Her body sprawled over the couch just as the Admin finished his speech and his image faded from Max’s memory.

Leena! his wife yelled and picked up the child, her hands trembling. She had been yelling before, but Max simply didn’t register it over his own thumping heart. His younger daughter began to cry, but the sound of her voice came distant, drowned by disbelief. Blood began to coagulate on the couch, turning it from clean beige to a grimy, brownish color. It had all happened in a span of a few breaths. Tears born of terror rolled down his face. He didn’t feel them on his cheeks or realized they had come, until he witnessed the same tears in his wife’s eyes. And just when it seemed his heart could not beat any faster, his wife’s nose began to bleed as well.

His thoughts filled with fire, their flames the color of insanity. Then… blank. He considered it a blessing now – the fact that he couldn’t remember his wife and his first child dying one by one. He didn’t want to remember. Fortunately, those images had been pushed aside by rage. A rage over the man he had inexplicably loved only moments before. Anger became the only clarity which remained. He tried to direct it, the rage, tried to pour it on the face that had somehow killed his family, but the memory of it no longer existed – deleted from his mind. Fear and helplessness gripped him.

How could he explain why his entire family was dead? And how could he expect anyone to believe him?

Max knew, without a doubt; he had to find Him. Him who had murdered all that he had loved. He cried in wet sobs, clutching his youngest daughter to his chest. His tears felt like they might burn through his cheeks. His stomach churned, slowly shrinking into the size of a needle–tip with each breath. His tears intermixed with their blood as they fell, he could hear each drop as it hit the soft fabric of the couch.

Then, His voice found him.

Max’s head throbbed as the sound came clearer and deeper than any he had ever heard before, I can bring them back, it claimed.

CHAPTER 2

To Know Others Is Wisdom, To Know The Self Is Enlightenment.

Since then, nine years had passed. Meditation had become the only means for him to keep his anger in check. A coping mechanism. He found it best to not even think of the events that had transpired, even thought he knew such thoughts would be necessary for him to get over such a loss. But there were some things one never gets over, not ever, things that eat at you from within if you do not learn to forget them. Learn to cope.

Max, however, found it best to not think of anything at all for as much of the time as possible, and meditation provided a means to do just that. That, and so much more.

Shortly after his family had been killed, strange men came to claim their bodies. None of them had said a word.

In his lost and confused state, he didn’t even feel them taking the body of his youngest progeny from his clutches.

I didn’t do it, he said. They didn’t even nod. They didn’t even look at him.

Had their eyes seen such a sight before? Had it made them complacent? Why wouldn’t they look at me!

He realized later that, at the time, he needed eyes to gaze into his and tell him it wasn’t his fault. Yet Max wondered if the eyes of these men were even capable of understanding. All he had gotten was silence.

The Administrator had promised the bodies of his family would be kept safe. But how could anyone bring a person back from the dead… was the mind not the center of all being? How could the Admin even hope to revive brains that had been inactive for almost a decade?

He pushed the thought aside as he had done more times than he could remember. Instead, he focused on his breathing, observed it, went with it, relaxed with it. His mind drifted into a state of conscious sleep.

His experience of the world and his perceptions shifted.

In his thoughts, he left his ethereal body without difficulty, in hunt of the Administrator.

After almost ten years of searching, Max had come no closer to finding the man. A man whose presence seemed to be everywhere and nowhere.

Absorbed in higher meditative states, Max’s mind remained entombed within flesh and bone, yet his consciousness would conceive of ways to expand his perception of reality in ways he wouldn’t have believed possible. Meditation had been a source of boredom before, his mind simply too active to even attempt to quiet down. But now, now he wished he had done it sooner.

As it usually became the case, the search for the Administrator took a back seat as the feelings he couldn’t describe took over. The sense of oneness, the sense of freedom. Max wasn’t even sure what he’d do once he would find him. Would killing the man ever really help me? Would I even kill the right man if I couldn’t even remember his face?

He abandoned those questions long ago. Because after all this time, he had found peace. At least as much as a man in his position could ever hope to find. If someone asked him about it, he always wished he could say that time heals all wounds, but when you have a lot of it, wounds had a tendency to simply pile up instead.

He could sense people looking at him. They stared at his mortal body as he sat in the middle of the square, the massive structure of the Grey–Tech tower expanding above him like a vertical mountain of glass. He heard voices somewhere in the distance, in the back of his perceptions.

Is that… the Proxy? one asked.

What would the Proxy be doing sitting in the middle of damn square, another asked the first skeptically.

Guys, move along, I’ve to get home, a third, female voice added.

He felt them brushing against his shoulders as they moved by, some even gently shook him as though making sure he was alive, but that didn’t perturb him at all. They didn’t need to know what he was doing. No one needed to know.

For the time being, Max had given up on his search to find clues to where the Administrator might be, and instead returned back to a scene that brought him peace no matter how many times he relived it in his mind – a scene he had seen as a child.

His thoughts centered, his inner eye expanded. Memories always came clearer in meditation, as thought a curtain were drawn.

The sight he witnessed was the construction of the first Grey–Tech tower ever built. A place he never thought of as home, but one which now served as one no less.

Its creation took no more than a day.

The sky simply disappeared. Or more precisely, took on a different hue. Parts of it were torn away in sheets of ice. The event had scared him at first, he could still feel a phantom of that fear. But as he came to understand what was happening, he had begun to marvel at the beauty of it and the fear evaporated.

Small robotic entities, each too tiny for his conscious mind to see, became clear in his meditative–state. They misted the air. Replicating endlessly, they poured out of the sky as if some God had sliced the atmosphere and allowed a stream of brilliance to pour down to the city sprawl like a waterfall.

The process of growth started out slow, but accelerated exponentially. Like a distant shore suddenly rising into the sky, the accumulated material grew, the peak of it soon lost in the atmosphere.

Nanites of microscopic size solidified into massive blocks of gold, each the size of a tower. The enfolding of liquid thoughts formed a rough figure eight, suddenly brilliant and streaming with concentrated lightning, the two massive cauls of its upper portion unconnected, dispersing in the ionosphere in an aurora of strangely symmetrical beauty.

Block by gilded block, the material formed a solid, smooth–edged tower, taller than anything Max had ever seen – its width an equal impossibility. Still the shape remained featureless, a monolith ready to be molded into shapes dictated only by the imaginations and machinations of its invisible creator. Outer layers of the building darkened, then turned into glass. The color of sky burst to life within it. First rooms began to form. Thought–projections burrowed through glass with the efficiency of uncountable termites, each laboring with unprecedented speed which even reality itself had a trouble following. In his ethereal vision, Max saw them as both solid objects – like tiny octopuses – and, at times, when his concentration wavered, as pure possibility without tangible form – an idea floating.

The though–patterns crafted what eventually became living quarters, immense indoor golf courses, even a vast area of rainforest, each trunk taller than a mountain, yet small in the building with the width of a continental lake. The forest seemingly grew out of nothing and forever–after served to filter and provide fresh air, the ceiling above it illuminating its canopy with searing heat.

Sounds of people and their gasps filled his senses. Memories of combined amazement and the sounds they made froze his thoughts for a moment as the soundscapes of his mind took over. Millions of voices marveling.

The construction’s innards had begun to take proper shapes, when a pain, sharper than anything he had ever felt or hoped to feel, snapped him back to his corporeal body. The hurt slithered in behind his eyes, biting away as if a living thing. He heard a voice call out to him, a skeletal voice without substance. It told of an eyelid and a world. But as the pain subsided, a sound of his heart thrumming became the singular clarity.

It felt impossible for him to open his eyes at first, as if he had slept for centuries.

Ngghh, he muttered under his breath. At length, his eyelids opened. Night had fallen around him. How long have I been meditating?

His Link relayed Bolt’s voice. The voice was as friendly as it was mischievous, glad and eager, its deep yet light tone suggesting an easygoingness – a friend. The only true friend he had managed to make in his entire life.

Can you hear me? I know you’re chillin’, but wake up, Bolt said.

Max grunted in response, rubbing his forehead and trying to dispel the last of the lingering pain.

The hell, man? I’ve been buzzing your for an hour, Bolt said.

I was–

Meditating?

Yes.

He heard Bolt sigh, his wife, Sara chuckling in the background. One of these days we’ll find you something better to do with you time, man. I think you wasted enough of it, and who knows how long you’ve left, old man.

Time you enjoy wasting isn’t wasted time, he said.

Is he quoting dead writers again? he heard Sara ask.

Yea, Bolt snickered.

Seemed appropriate… Max said and stood up, stretching his limbs, his knees popping. Also, old can still be good, just mom agrees, Max chuckled.

Now that’s just low, Bolt retorted, laughing despite himself.

No matter the hour, the square beneath the spire always brimmed with people coming and going, passing out of the building’s cavernous entrance, their footsteps echoing over the glass tiles. The smells they combined were surprisingly pleasant, intermixing into shades of perfume. Max tried not to focus on their idle conversations. The feat, however, proved difficult, despite having a friend’s voice talking in his