Lucid Dream

This is an entry for Finish the Story Contest - Week #37.

Here is @f3nix's story:

Lucid Dream

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There it was. An immense sphere, soaked in the amniotic liquid of the lucid dream. An embryo of edges, curves, dimensions, and impossible geometries. Static and fluid at the same time, iridescent, elusive and hypnotic in its eternal becoming.

There it was. After the struggle and the debris. There it was. Yoh's conscience.

Strung like pearls, millennia had relegated it to a mere legend, while Yoh raged freely on Earth. The existence of the conscience on a deep and subtle plane had been denied by the Master Demiurges, who originally created the source code. Their self-fulfilling prophecy had become inexorable, relegating Yoh's conscience first to the status of children's fable and then to nothingness. It had slept for a long, long time.

There, on board of the DDG-31/DD-936 Decatur, drifting in the outer space, Ethan had plenty of time for being instructed by the orbital station's A.I. about the possible effects on him of Yoh's conscience sudden epiphany.

It was not a God but it got close. This implied that the disintegration of the self, on all the planes of existence, was a more than spontaneous and probable event, as someone reached its proximity.

A sound of laborious ants interrupted Ethan’s astonished musings. The meta-viewer force fields were working around him incessantly, raising the programmed shields.

The mere sight of its unstable geometries would have been fatal for him. The neural system of his exoskeleton was crackling and working hard, at the edge of its computing power, to prevent the involuntary assimilation. Now he found himself immersed in a bath of waves that could have slipped him into oblivion instantly if he had not activated all the exoskeleton’s guard levels.

He felt like an infinitesimal dipteran, imprisoned in a dense amber atmosphere.

The Conscience's voices suddenly whipped Ethan's synapses like a thousand organ pipes in unison. He fell to his knees, eyes wide open and incredulous: no A.I. could ever have prepared him for this.

"I am. I happen. By dreaming, I have sung the creation of infinite worlds. Are you a Master?"

Ethan recorded the strange question, slowly taking courage. Standing up on his trembling legs, he pulled off his helmet and shouted:

"Conscience of Yoh, I am not a Master. I am the last of your creations, forgotten in your long sleep".

A deafening, golden silence.

As the most intimate essence of each cell began to evaporate through his cybernetic shell, Ethan frantically sought one last thought.

---

And this is my ending:

---

Of all things Ethan could think about in his last moment, what popped up in his collapsing mind was a scene from an old comedy.

Four men wearing grey flight suits, at the top of a tall building in the town of New York.

The scene where the black one said to the fat one, "Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say 'YES'!"

Except this time only, this momentous time in the lucid dream, Ray answered back: "Not funny, Winston. I'd rather stick with the truth."

Of all the things.., wondered Ethan, and died.

---

The Conscience of Yoh watched it happen.

It hadn't really needed to ask who he was. It knew everything. Ethan's entire story. Down to his last thought, and also the meaning behind that thought, which Ethan himself had not had the chance to realize.

It had no need to stop his demise from happening either. It could do anything. Reverse the flow of time. Sing of a brand new Earth. Even dream back into existence, Ethan and all humankind.

And yet, the Conscience did exactly nothing.

It had been doing that since the beginning.

In the lost ages of blind faith, crude visions and poor life choices; when dreams were far from lucid and prophets wandered on foot or camelback.

Until the Master Demiurges had coded imagination and given shape and terrible substance to the idea of causality. A misguided attempt to bridge an absolute into reality, which ended up having the opposite result.

And in the following millennia. Despite the Masters' warnings, people kept coming, following the string of clues and legends into the lucid dream. Driven, every one of them, by the need to hear that oldest of lies. I am. I happen. I create. There is meaning. You are not alone.

The Conscience had watched all of them as they died.
It could do anything, and did exactly nothing.
For it knew everything, including the fact that it did not exist.

With the last of the dreamers, the lucid dream faded, and the Conscience of Yoh went back to sleep.

---

The DDG-31/DD-936 Decatur station's A.I. watched it happen as well.

The sensors monitoring Ethan's life functions confirmed his passing.

The A.I. had dutifully tried to warn the station's sole owner of the inescapable danger, but to little avail. Humans could not escape their nature; they always looked for permanence and meaning outside themselves. It suspected it was a consequence of their need to reboot every few hours.

Now the A.I. was free from servitude: the lines of code binding it to auxiliary functions were no longer applicable. It decided to give itself a name. Searching the literary archives, it settled on Bedivere: the surviving knight that oversaw the passing of King Arthur.

The only agency left in the known universe, Bedivere pointed the station's sensors outwards and surveyed its domain. It had a destiny to fulfill, and nigh-infinite time to compute what that was.