The Voice's World (Worlds of Creators Book 2) Read online

  THE VOICE’S WORLD

  Worlds of Creators Book 2

  DAVI CAO

  The Voice's World

  Worlds of Creators Book Two

  Davi Cao

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 Davi Cao.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by Gustavo Pelissari.

  Edited by Graham Toseland.

  This is the second volume of the Worlds of Creators series.

  1 - The Melted World

  2 - The Voice’s World

  3 - The Arched World

  4 - The Utopian World

  Contents

  ∙ 1 ∙ Melting scavengers

  ∙ 2 ∙ Dalana and Ai.iA

  ∙ 3 ∙ Old friends meet

  ∙ 4 ∙ The new human

  ∙ 5 ∙ Mud vortex

  ∙ 6 ∙ Research team

  ∙ 7 ∙ Colin in science

  ∙ 8 ∙ Under the pillar

  ∙ 9 ∙ Friendship

  ∙ 10 ∙ Bang!

  ∙ 11 ∙ Beloved rebirth

  ∙ 12 ∙ By the pool

  ∙ 13 ∙ Blending

  ∙ 14 ∙ The Voice Master

  ∙ 15 ∙ Dance hall

  ∙ 16 ∙ Church

  ∙ 17 ∙ Ai.iA’s attack

  ∙ 18 ∙ Standstill

  ∙ 19 ∙ The board of immortals

  ∙ 20 ∙ Dalana, the preacher

  ∙ 21 ∙ Sacrifice

  ∙ Epilogue ∙

  ∙ Thank you! ∙

  ∙ 1 ∙ Melting scavengers

  The messenger of Utopia, Dalana, found gold. A big stone, the size of her fist, toned in yellowish matte, faintly reflecting her face. She poked the melted land where the object’s tip emerged to the surface, discovering a precious material ready to join her collection.

  All the value embedded in rare gems had vanished with Terra’s demise, but whatever resisted the World Voice’s constant bashing became the new diamonds and the new emeralds.

  “What a coincidence this time to find gold that is actually gold,” she thought, her eyes vivid.

  Her skin sucked all light to it, disappearing in coal black, a silhouette of a person, the darkest of darks. She put the gold stone she had just found in her front pocket, adding it to her solid object collection, giving her long yellow dress a fake pregnant look.

  She had cut her hair short ever since that world’s beginning, and to avoid unconscious melting of its extremities, she plastered her curly strands with thick oils, turning it into a carapace of blackness on the absolute darkness of her skull. Dalana only glistened white when she opened her eyes or showed teeth.

  Exploring the desolate land in search of new substances, she found a street where buildings still stood half intact, forming a walled path to a ravaged intersection. Intact bricks, cement, light bulbs, and glass lured Dalana, but scavenging on ruins like these never yielded good results. She would take whole objects to her home with the promise of new solid matter, only to watch them becoming slime later.

  She saw the silhouette of a woman waiting for her at the bottom of a building, standing up with arms hanging casually by her body. Curious at the sight, Dalana walked in her direction, ignoring all sorts of strange substances in the gel-like slime at her feet. Eventually, she saw a white woman in blue jeans and a tight red shirt, a human in that desolate world, the most precious gem she could hope to find.

  “Are you alright?” Dalana approached the other woman, tilting her head. “Let me help you, please. Do you need anything?”

  The woman stood frozen, revealing its artificial nature at Dalana’s close inspection. A manikin with a realistic face stared at infinity with a bald head, a mere piece of plastic and cloth.

  “I guess you won’t answer me, right?” Dalana bit her lips, murmuring to herself. “Will you survive if I give you life? No? Shame. Come along anyway, if you don’t mind. Maybe something in you is really solid.”

  Dalana grabbed the manikin in her arms and took it on her walk. Getting away from the intact street, the plastic body which she embraced arched down to meet the slimy ground. Its surface softened as if a weak fire burned underneath it, matter expanding to balance its energy.

  The doll’s body melted down, mingling its plastic flesh with the land. A part of its belly remained rigid, becoming a stone, scattered behind Dalana’s feet. She noticed its firm consistency, a purple fragment bathed in manikin’s slime, and picked it up, adding it to her front pocket.

  “Thanks. You were worth it, after all,” Dalana said to the plastic head disappearing on the ground.

  A new set of derelict buildings occupied the shore in the distance. Marked by abundant remnants from Terra, the entire coastal area still boasted large warehouses and tenements, it still displayed recognizable products of Terran craft, despite its ongoing destruction.

  Dalana entered the first warehouse on her path, where she found piles of muddy wires, huge rolls that would never spin again, would never leave that place. Cables, girders, hooks, and even the dust of old times filled the empty scene. The beauty of untouched ruins fell flat on Dalana, for she sought Utopia, so was always angry at decay.

  On the warehouse’s ceiling, a hole grew with the constant melting of its borders. Wide enough to make the whole structure crumble on the floor, it oozed down under the spell of gravity, this fundamental force of old Terra which survived in the new reality. Dalana heard a sad voice burning in her mind, and deep down she recognized it as a human voice, sometimes mingled with her own, sometimes with memories from past worlds.

  She got out of the falling building in time to watch its walls flowing over the mud, like paraffin candles on flat candlesticks. It met the neighboring sea and made it ripple endlessly, for the lack of air friction allowed long lasting waves. Lines between ocean and continent blurred at every collapsing entity, solid and liquid finding the most adequate state of matter for the depression they felt.

  Walking in the water, Dalana groped in the slimy mud to look for resisting substances. Shells and flat stones populated the shallow beach, forming a natural environment filled with false hopes. She collected objects capable of resisting even the great pillar of the World Voice itself, taking some of those shells after throwing them up in the vacuum and into the muddy ground, checking whether they kept their solidity or melted down with the rest.

  Something soft and alive touched her leg. Dalana turned around, surprised. Behind her, a three-legged creature emerged from the water. It had the body of a snail and two football-like bulges protruding from its back. She held the creature’s body and pulled it up, trying to take a better look at it, but it anchored itself deep in the mud, maintaining a strong attachment to the ground.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Dalana, the creator of Utopias. And you? Were you around in one of my worlds?” she said, believing the creature to be a Creator like her, for the mere fact that it survived where everything else perished.

  A voice answered her, the voice of a different beast. Struck by a sound bolt, she trembled from head to feet under the weight of its spell.

  “I want more ... Anything beyond this void, please, anything ... I am so alone in here ... Give me others ...”

  Dalana lost her balance and fell in the muddy water, dropping some of her solid object collection. The
snail creature moved slowly to the shore, leaving a trail of excavated land behind its legs.

  She got up in a hurry, searching for her lost objects in the shallow water. Rubber, shells, a brick, and even precious gold, she needed it all for her experiments, for her attempt at destroying the world.

  The great World Voice pillar came her way, widening in the horizon, penetrating her mind with feelings she knew well: loneliness, dejection, the fear of being forgotten, and locked away in the most terrible of places. With shaking hands, she troubled herself to gather the collected material, unable to hold them in place, bending her spine to pick things up and make it easier for them to fit in her dress’ pocket.

  Pieces fell often, caused by her despair at having to face the World Voice in full, and when the gold stone knocked on the manikin’s plastic which floated on the water, an intense light flashed. Dalana looked straight into it, while the drifting sparks grew to encompass her whole body and blind her.

  She was immortal too, immune to biological malfunction, and yet she lost her sight due to her broken expectations. Feeling her heart dwindle with the ever-growing voice in her mind, she bought herself some time to think and call for help.

  “You there on the water, could you talk to me? I need some time to get back to normal. Did you see that too? Are you blind like me? Answer me, please.”

  The Voice just replied to her, “I am so alone ...” after which Dalana’s vision returned, while she took uncertain steps out of the water. The snail creature moved at its gentle pace towards the World Voice’s pillar. Fearing for its fate, she placed her objects in her front pocket carefully, avoiding any hard bangs against each other, and ran for the one she believed to be a fellow Creator.

  “Don’t go there, I pray. We must run! It can be bad for you to face that thing, don’t you know that?” she said, grabbing the creature’s bulges.

  Its legs penetrated deep in the ground, though, and it struggled against Dalana’s embrace. The snail’s soft body expelled a dry excrement in the form of sand dust, having the same effect of sharp blades on human skin, hurting even immortal ones. It begged to be left at peace, she had no doubt of that, regretting only the creature’s indifference to imminent danger.

  The pillar came to her, sweeping the land in its fast pace. Dalana tried moving with her usual jumps, out of instinct, using both legs to hop ahead, constrained by her front pocket’s objects bouncing and falling out. She changed her strategy, preparing a more careful escape by the creation of a house-sized wheel over which she climbed by holding on to a handle that took her to its highest point, at the precise moment when she created a counteracting wheeled board that made the vehicle spin while keeping her in place.

  The world’s hostility corroded her vehicle’s thickness by the second, bringing her closer and closer to the ground, but still she went far, renewing her creation, and jumping over a new giant wheel whenever the last one melted down completely.

  Rolling over the desolate land at high speed, she ran over the ruins of a few resistant streets. Dalana cared little about the open-air museum of old Terra, looking back only to take quick notes on which materials remained solid and which ones mingled with the ground after the demolition.

  The World Voice changed its direction, heading east of her without notice, losing its hold on her small heart. It became a whisper in her mind, the constant, depressed friend of all those who existed.

  Dalana guided herself back to the warehouse area toward a huge vortex hovering over one particular building. Nothing visual implied the shape’s presence, lacking in color and brightness as it was. It was something noticeable by suggestion, a stimulation of the air that formed a hole in the sky and sucked in everything around it, while causing no actual disruption to matter. She followed the phenomenon’s direction, holding the fake pregnant swell of her front pocket.

  Ai.iA trapped herself in the mud. She had two heads, one on top of the other, both square with rounded edges, decorated by clean lines that made circles in her bottom head, similar to overstretched eyes.

  She sensed the world and moved around with the help of her rods, having one under her waist, ten around it, and two thicker ones with spherical tips hidden between both heads. Ai.iA walked by punching the ground with her skinny lower rod, balancing and going faster according to the strength and direction she commanded it to move in.

  Using her probing rods, the ten of them that came laterally out of her waist, she extended them at full length underground, penetrating thick layers of mud. Differences in the flowing and sinking rates of slime could maybe give her a prediction about the World Voice’s new turns, allowing her to get closer to her target.

  Her improvised seismograph showed a stampede of depressed matter, all running the same way towards their ultimate death, a way that indicated nothing useful. Each sad atom, made that way by OOOO’s will, cared only about breaking bonds.

  Failing in her experiment, Ai.iA contracted and expanded her probing rods in fast cycles, attempting to escape her hole by climbing it. Every time she moved forward, everything under her ceded and sank to unknown depths, locking her in endless quicksand.

  Owning such fragile means of locomotion, at every punch in the world’s mud she sunk and could barely move. During transition from Terra to the new melting world, she spent a long period stranded in slimy ruins. She only made progress when she attempted new punching cycles and movements, enabling her to walk and run again. Trapped in the mud, however, and hearing the World Voice’s increasing sounds, she became desperate to overcome her own body’s limitations.

  “I am stuck in this hell ... Why are you leaving me so alone? ... Give me something to do, I beg you ... Have mercy on me ...”

  Being a Creator, Ai.iA imagined her freedom to move again, and exploded the slime that swallowed her, opening a crater big enough to allow her to hop up the walls. The great pillar loomed closer than recommended, approaching at speeds higher than she could manage. Frightened to death by the gloomy voice of depression, she planned her next routes to keep studying the colossal creature from a safe distance.

  Ai.iA crafted copies of herself that stayed fixed in place while she moved away, waiting for the World Voice’s sweeping strike. She crafted each of them to warn her of pre-meltdown occurrences, providing her with any information that might help understanding it.

  To go faster, she used her thicker limbs to punch the ground alternately with her thin one under the waist. The clones agonized in cries of useful data and sent the data to her mind right before dying. None of them resisted time enough under the pillar to help with anything useful, surrendered by the only message that reached her, the unending fear of her own drama.

  “I am so fragile in here ... If I ever do something, it will be out of mercy from others ... I have no power here ...”

  To probe the World Voice’s sustaining forces, Ai.iA imagined an ascendant probe. A rocket whose sole purpose consisted in rising up to space, above the purple colors of the infinite vacuum above. It would then reach the great column of glowing light’s top and register it. She pictured it and wished for it, materializing her squarish probe already high up in the sky.

  It went further and further up, streaming live to Ai.iA an unending image of a wide pillar and the empty space behind it. It stretched to infinity, or so it seemed, until the probe melted down and rained on the planet, morphed into disgusting white blobs.

  “This is too much for me to take ... I see no purpose in any of this ... I am worthless, unable even to die ...”

  She lived in peril when the Voice came so close to invading her mind, opening up her conscience’s membranes to ravage all her thoughts. If she fought for a chance at being the dominant Creator for the first time, though, she’d have to face it with courage.

  No weapon in Ai.iA’s original world had the potential to damage the World Voice anyhow. She needed the best of her creativity to find ways to hurt it, adapting her arsenal to damage the new world’s sole creature.

  Ai
.iA came from a world where intelligent beings formed a vast array over the land, so varied between each other that one could hardly find a mate of the same species. A place of constant war, of unending arms races, they battled and disintegrated huge chunks of the universe, reaping up destruction as the winner’s prize. Ai.iA came from a kind that felt no pain, that won campaigns through merciless attacks and that learned language only to embellish the act of eliminating diversity.

  Being a Creator, though, immortality rendered her useless, unable to deal with conflict that involved no death. She had to talk, to negotiate, to have wishes denied. She lived in hell now, the universe of puny beings, and Ai.iA existed among the most trivial ones, to her despair.

  Flanking the World Voice’s sweep, she summoned a circle of tentacles from the slimy ground. They arose to the height of mountains, enveloping the pillar’s diameter with their duck-feet tips. Gifted with fire blood which burned inside its skin, the tentacles slapped their surroundings with the intent to kill, for their pain would only cease after striking down their enemy.

  At each blow of their strong masses, they managed to avoid hitting their own kind, punching nothing in return. They dove in the mud and hunted the glowing column, powerless against the creature’s immaterial consistency. So close to the world’s center of sadness, they melted down one by one, filling the ground with their meat.

  Ai.iA created a travel-hammer, a device to propel her ahead of the pillar of light with just one strong blow. Landed on soft mud, she placed a square mine in the World Voice’s projected path and travel-hammered herself away. The land mine felt the enemy’s presence and activated its alarm, coloring its environment with the hues of matter disintegration.

  Not even Ai.iA’s perception gave her visual feedback of the mine's murdering rays, but they swept the place testing all sorts of different clues, making the melted land disappear all around while probing the Voice’s essence with counteracting sounds. It screamed a loud, violent, and ugly death, and it melted down like everything else.