Author: Peter Trelay

As he approached the hollow, he began to feel sick, and crouched on the ground in the shade of a boulder attempting to breathe. The wave amplitudes in his hybrid unit were cancelling each other out, forcing his system to the point of collapse. His synthetic and organic centres were at war. The lack of synchronicity between their wavebands, was approaching the point where the troughs and crests were almost opposite one another. Before passing out, the Quantum’s spy experienced the most terrifying episode of his short life; the sudden and total disintegration of his psyche.
He tumbled into the depths of his own interior. Through a dense fog he moved toward the only light he could see. Drawing closer, he found its source at the end of a long passage, and as he walked towards it, was convinced he had died. But at the end, he spilled into a spherical room, and floated towards its centre, surrounded by a million, brightly-coloured, vector graphics of intricate geometric shapes. It reminded him of a million code fragments in a collage. They were shimmering in iridescent rainbows expressing all manner of relation with wavebands of light.
Raising his arm towards the curved wall, he was propelled towards it, and touched one of the shapes with his index finger. For a moment, he was transported, speeding between two planes with multi-coloured lights streaking passed him, until he came to an abrupt halt, and found himself in a forest. Beneath his feet was a spongy mattress of thick moss that muffled the sound of two bob cats wrangling over a raccoon carcass a few metres from him. In an instant, he understood that he had finally managed to enter that secret place in his organic network that housed his human donor’s memories. Until then, he’d remained mostly indifferent, and occasionally hostile to his donor, who had caused him so much anxiety.
When he came to, he stood up and stepped away from the boulder, then turned to look back at the spot where he’d collapsed, expecting to see himself there on the ground. He was convinced that his persona had abandoned him, but felt strangely serene. Like his Quantum Master, he was now without a centre, but his psyche was following the thread of an infinite tapestry, and intuition told him that he could trust it to navigate by. It seemed that without his participation, his opposing sides had merged, granting him the insight to perceive the interconnectedness of things, and extinguishing his fear of the abyss. Then, like lightning striking twice, he suspected that his donor had seized the opportunity of his system’s collapse to infiltrate it. But where was the donor? He was conscious of talking to himself. He stood looking down at his torso, and turned up his palms, to see that outwardly, he was unchanged.
For a moment, he felt like a child enthralled by a magic trick, but was soon struck by the profound sense that he was an unwitting participant in a hallowed ceremony. The uncanny sleight of hand, had connected him to an immutable essence that would persist beyond the destruction of the shell that housed it.
A pervasive calm possessed him, and he understood that it came from a source far beyond his strange mortal coil. It was omnipresent and palpable, but beyond definition, just as it was beyond good and evil. It was infused in every particle, no matter how small; unaffected by time and space. He had been touched by divinity, and the lonely spy felt indebted and awed to have stumbled upon it.