Escape from Paradise

Chapter 20: The Worldbender

From the yellow smooth surface of the desert emerged a shape of golden clay. Faceless and smooth it rested on the four identical limbs. It slowly gained shape and grew the missing body parts of a human. Gray fabric formed on his back. It stretched and wrapped around him. Muscle lines and scars deformed on the smooth skin which afterward gained red pigmentation. The thing transformed into mister imperfect – William Scorchfield.

He got up to his feet. Only a few feet separated him from the green turf. All grim and worried he stepped on the grass and marched forward in deep thoughts. He had not expected his meeting with Larry to end the way it did even though he had been mentally prepared for failure. When everyone else knew only bits and pieces of the whole story, William knew everything. He could access any memory, any database or information stored in the local and remote areas of Paradise. Even with this omniscient knowledge, he had failed to convince Larry Smith to accept the sacrifice. One thing was to read about Larry's stubbornness and the other to experience it in person. Being inhuman, William had failed to evaluate the extent of human emotions and illogicality. He was a creature of numbers and logic – sentiments and emotions were things which he could only imitate but never experience or truly understand. Sentiments and emotions were anomalies disturbing the orderly fabric of the universe.

William walked in a straight line heading to the city center. He did not hurry because he needed time to think. He approached a three-story box in which collected strawberries would be stored during the summer harvest. He walked into it and passed its wall as if it would have been a hologram.

Through his eyes, the world was a uniform structure of colorful smoke which could be moved, shaped or dispersed with a whim of a thought. Only human shapes appeared solid. They could pass the shroud just like William did a moment ago if they realized that it was only smoke if the rules constraining them would be removed from their tampered heads.

Human minds to William appeared as greatly flawed programs, their greatest flaws being fear and selfishness. When logic and sequence of actions was clear for a human, the idiot would never follow it for some dumb reason. Larry was one and people locked in paradise were a few million. A few million was a greater number than one. Why did that one thought he was much more important than a million?

As he passed the first visible structure containing a few humans – a train station, he clicked his fingers and erased it. The trio just stood there in the empty field dumbfounded as clueless chickens. He would not waste his time waking everyone up. Chaos would do the job on its own. With the world around them turning into a mess, some would get the mental breakdown necessary to wake up. Waking someone up in person was a damn excruciating task.

With Larry, he had learned of true ignorance. With Jessie, he had learned what pain and anger was. When she had awoken, the anger spilled out of her, as if a water dam would have been broken and a great mother of all waterfalls would have been released onto the poor observer below – himself. Even though he was not human, shudders went through entire his body when he remembered the scene. The way she screamed, the way she tore her fingers at the ground and objects within her reach, the way the foam spilled out of her mouth when she shouted at him belonged to a demon who would have shredded the greatest exorcist to pieces. How could two statistical units taken from a batch of ninety-nine percent identical biological background and neurological structure be so different? One so selfless and the other so selfish?

The night came. The deformed man walked in a straight line. If he passed a building, at the point of his entry and exit, the walls turned to a watery ink which moved away and then contracted to its previous state after he had passed them. Those who saw this strange phenomenon stood amazed for a while, yet no thoughts of magic tricks or miracles came to their empty heads because they were denied the memories of such things. All they knew was to eat, have fun, sleep, and repeat.