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By Root 281 0

wanted to. They were not passive cameras, recording blindly. It infuriated him. What they didn’t want to see, they just ignored. Swamped by data, they would discard most of the detail into the back parts of their brains, not even registering it. Selectively editing reality until it fitted with what they wanted it to be. He had removed the filters from one of them, torn them away so that the human could see everything clearly. For a few hours, Enrique had been overwhelmed. He had seen a lucid, clarified reality, freed from the warping perceptions of the human mind. Then, without warning, that mind had turned on him and shut him out. The stream of data had been cut off again. The Absolute had found himself bounded by the illogic and misrule of his uncontrolled Observers. It was then that he’d given himself form.

He was blind, by human standards. A ghostly duplicate of the human he had tried to control. He’d tried to move like them, to inhabit the same spaces as them, but he’d still been unable to see like them, or make sense of their conflicting truths. Everything he needed to see was around him: a huge web of data feeds from the Observers. There, for example, was the viewpoint of a man as he helped a little girl into the bomb shelter. He could flick easily from either point of view.

The concerned man saw the dark steps, the poorly lit interior with bulbs held in place with twisted wires. He felt the weight of the building above them, the fragility of their shelter. The unseen planes were huge, black, oppressive. Roaring inexorably in from the Balearics. He gripped the tiny hand harder in his, terrified she would slip from his sweating grasp. The girl was hopping down the steps, excitedly dragging her guardian behind her. Unafraid of the darkness. In her head, the bombers didn’t even exist, just the excitement of the shelter. Seeing a friend on the narrow benches, she laughed and slipped free.

The Absolute pulled the two images together, overlapped them to see what was true in both. If he could just whittle all the versions down to one. So few details matched though. The tight grip the man believed he had was non-existent to her. To the man the girl was tiny, delicate. To the girl, the man was just a large mass behind her. Trying to look at both at once made Enrique furious. Why couldn’t they be impartial, as he was? They were trapping him here with their incoherence. He raged back and forth across the attic floor, the frozen moments skittering out of his way. He wanted to kick at things but his appropriated form didn’t have enough mass to do more than swirl the dirt on the floorboards.

Calm. He had to stay calm. Rational. Channel the confusion and annoyance away. That was another thing he had learned from the humans. If the facts couldn’t be reconciled, disregard the set that didn’t fit.

* * *

‘I could drive for a bit.’

‘No. You couldn’t.’

Fitz tucked his chin further down into the upturned collar of his jacket and grinned. Sasha had responded exactly as he’d predicted and it lifted his confidence a little. He’d woken a few minutes earlier when the truck had jolted dramatically, falling away beneath him. For a moment, Fitz had thought it was overturning and had braced his arms ready to protect his head. Then he’d realised Sasha had run it into the drainage ditch. The Russian was sitting at the wheel, gripping it far too tightly and staring ahead.

‘You fell asleep, didn’t you?’ Fitz had said accusingly and the other man had had the decency to look embarrassed. The mist had risen again as the light had fallen, the blinkered headlights barely reached the bank in front of them. Sasha announced that they would park up for the night, get some rest. Fitz had been privately relieved: he didn’t want to be actually in the town when the bombing started. He’d vocally bitched about the delay, though, as they’d struggled to reverse the truck back out of the ditch. The Russian had eventually reminded him who had the gun. They’d finished recovering the vehicle in silence after that, Sasha throwing Fitz the odd tired and annoyed