Monster - A. Lee Martinez [88]
For the first time, he noticed that the room had other doors. Or maybe the doors had materialized on their own. A flight of stairs appeared too.
“What’s behind those doors?” he asked. “What’s up there?” Lotus said, “I don’t know. Secrets, I suppose.”
“Whose secrets?”
“If I knew that much, I’d probably know what was behind the door.”
Monster stared out the window at the lovely spring day that he could see but not touch.
“Why did you want Judy?” he asked.
“No reason,” she replied quietly.
“Come on now. You can’t lie to me here. This place is all about information, isn’t it?”
“I’m not here to share my secrets with you. I’m merely keeping you sane and connected to the stone so that I can better locate you in the real world. I have a connection with the stone, so I could track it down in time. But while you commune with it, the resonance is stronger, so it speeds things up considerably.”
“Aha! You aren’t helping me! You’re just using me! I knew you’d slip up.”
“I didn’t let it slip. I just didn’t care if you knew. It’s not as if that knowledge will help you any. Look at you, Monster. Here you are, at one with all there is to know in the cosmos, and you’re hiding in someone else’s happy memory. If I hadn’t saved you, you’d either be swallowed by humanity’s fears or driven mad with knowledge.” She set down her magazine and picked up another. “Do yourself a favor and wait it out. This will all be over soon enough.”
He thought about arguing with her, but she wasn’t wrong.
“How long before you find me?” he asked. “In the real world?”
“A complicated question. What is the real world, after all?”
Monster realized he wasn’t cut out for this metaphysical bullshit.
“Come on,” he said. “Tell me the truth. What’s the big deal about Judy? How can she summon cryptos? What’s it matter if I know? I’m useless, aren’t I?”
“Perhaps,” she agreed. “But even fools can be dangerous. You’ve already complicated my plans. I don’t know how exactly, but—”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t.” She snarled. It was very slight, but it was there. Monster laughed. “Ha! And I thought you were supposed to be so damn smart. Here we are in the repository of all knowledge in the universe. Why don’t you ask? Because you can’t! Because your connection to the stone is fading while mine is growing. Because I have the stone in the real world, and you don’t. And as long as I do, that’ll continue to happen.”
“You won’t have it long,” said Lotus softly.
“But no one else has ever bonded with the stone the way I have,” he said. “And that scares you, doesn’t it?”
She chuckled, but it was a little forced. “Don’t be absurd.”
“After hundreds of millions of years, you’re finally scared that someone is going to take your…” Monster stopped. “Hey, how do I know all this?”
He was dry now. All that information, that metaphorical rain, had soaked into his skin. And unlike the downpour, it’d worked its way into his mind without overwhelming him, without his even realizing it. And the balance of knowledge gained exceeded the amount lost. He couldn’t remember his phone number, but he did know that the omniverse was a series of fifty dimensional spheres and that they rested upon one another like a bunch of rubber balls in an infinitely large box.
Almost all of it was useless information. Like knowing the exact temperature on Mars. Somebody might benefit from it, but not him. His problems were more immediate than the nature of reality itself.
He sat and pondered. What did he need to know? The stone could tell him anything, but if he didn’t make a conscious effort to choose what he learned, he was going to learn too much and too little at the same time. He was only mortal. His mind could only hold so much, needed time to assimilate whatever fell into it. The universe was filled with secrets, and he understood now that one of the biggest was that no one needed to know them all.
This was a realm of imagination and symbolism. He needed to think in those terms.
He picked up the beer and stared at it. He focused on the positive. His demon girlfriend had tried