Chapter 82: Time and Space

“Do I have to lie down somewhere or do something?”

Not even that, said Nemo in his head. Just stay in the room. Lucky pretended to be relaxed, but he was nervously tapping his heel on the floor as he lined up the shots of angel tears. The eagle-man was working on his keyboard nearby. He typed surprisingly slowly, in front of a black screen that held nothing appealing. He asked Lucky to tell him the way he had died.

“Well, there was this whore, named...”

He suddenly had the sensation of being immersed in a block of dry concrete. His open eyes saw nothing but void, the dry stone invading his mouth, his larynx, and his esophagus, down to the smallest cell of his lungs. He could not scream, and his organs flooded him with distress and a nameless agony. He thought, in total panic, I’m going to die, and words appeared in his mind: This is Nemo. You are not going to die. It’s hard, but get used to it. On a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the maximum, how do you feel the pain?

A million. Torture. Too much.

Two abject minutes, during which Lucky’s body would have given anything for a crumb of comfort, just to be able to breathe - when he begged for it to end, even if it meant dying. Nemo was speaking to him, but he no longer read him. The thought that he would not die rose within him, but faintly. He associated this pain with Huan - if the despot had ever dreamed of the worst possible torture, this was it.

And then ... one gets used to everything, it seems. The body accepted that it would not die, though it could not breathe, even as its pulmonary muscles hammered like mad.

“I think it’s getting better, Nemo.”

“Okay, try to visualize words rather than speak, it comes through very scrambled here.”

“I can’t read or write, man.”

“Don’t move...”

He felt a small envelope tighten around him and then burst with a “plop.”

“I just installed a speech-to-text for you. If my predictions are correct, you can’t see anything.”

“Man, I’m inside a block of cement.”

“Close your eyes virtually - or at least imagine that you’re doing it - and try to be as calm as possible. You’re about to receive a kind of stimulation from somewhere ... I can’t describe it to you; you’re the first living being to experience this. And don’t worry, if it doesn’t work, I’ll bring you back here.”

Nemo’s reassuring words did him good. He tried to summon as much calm as possible, which was difficult with the constant messages from his body screaming that he was dying ... and then yes, he felt something like an extra limb inside his body, near his diaphragm. It was like a hand one could extend in a direction. The hand fumbled, and managed to recreate something in his mind: it was Nemo’s room. It was very strange, because he could feel it perfectly with “the hand of the body,” as he called it - but he could also see it perfectly: visually, in a cubist way, that is, with all dimensions projected onto a single plane. He saw Nemo and Euyin from the front, but also in profile, from every side, above and below at the same time. He also saw the entire room and every microscopic detail down to the minimum definitional length of the After in the same image. It would be impossible with an eye, but with the new perception, it was possible. “The hand that sees everything,” he called it. They weren’t simply visual data: he also had simulated temperatures, textures and materials, the names of every unique identifier of the digital objects. Immersing himself into Euyin’s eye, he saw all his thoughts and the sum of his personality and his secrets. He had a good heart, and felt guilty for having dragged Lucky into this, but he planned to dive in himself one day.