"Perfect. All Elias black hole's fault..."
"In summary. Someone killed me. Infinite times, the poem already revealed it. Ketlen and I died from 531 back, but the loop broke at 532; something is missing, and that's dangerous."
"I'm dead on the floor; I or something killed me in this room, a short while ago, or a long time ago, considering the time distortion. My corpse is floating in all eight directions, along with the infinite others, all connected at 532."
"The primary direction is to continue. Therefore, the break comes from going backward. But conversely, it would indicate that the answer is to go forward."
"But there's no forward. There's no side, no direction; it's all the same. 533 can be represented as Nundinae, but also as 531 part two, as everything is the same, just inverted."
"There are only two options. And both are lethal."
"How do I go back if the door closed and it won't open?"
"Nah... There's some philosophical stuff going on here, man..." He scratched his shoulder, chuckling softly. "If I undo everything the loop wants... Am I doing it because I want to?"
The light flickered again, for half a second.
The answer was that Nunes wouldn't go forward or backward; he would remain at 532. As he always had been.
"I'm going to open this shit."
"And when the door opens... I'll pretend I'm leaving, but I'll go straight in."
Nunes took a deep breath, walking to the button that opened the hatch.
The door opened, revealing a dark room, the door ajar.
"My apartment?" he narrowed his eyes, seeing a hamster grunting at him in the distance "Why is there a hamster in my apt.?"
The wall clock read 3:30, frozen.
He walked, but when he stepped into the guest room, he was instantly blown back into the ship. The hatch closed.
"Whoop-de-doo, you son-of-a-bitch loop!"
The light didn't go out; it shattered. Darkness consumed the room, and a sound emerged.
The back hatch, 531, opened. Silence. He shouldn't have been there, and he knew it.
"Nunes?" Ketlen's voice, distorted, like a dog trying to speak.
"Damn it... Now what?"
"Nunes..." It wasn't her.
"..."
"How did you get here? I just killed you."
"Oh, crap..."
She started walking toward him. Nunes closed his eyes, pretending it simply didn't exist.
"Look at me."
...
"Look."
...
"Please, look at me."
"If I look at her... what will I see?" He remembered himself dead, faceless, right there in front of him.
"No fucking way. I can't look at her. I must have seen her and... died."
He felt it, that sensation of something stretching toward his eye, even with them closed.
The damned fingers.
"DAMN IT"
He jolted up, eyes still closed, simply heading for the back hatch.
"You're going to fall... no, you won't..."
When he entered... There was no floor.
He fell.
A lot.
"HOLY SHIT"
When he opened his eyes, he was falling into the void, or into Nundinae.
Or so he thought.
The void swallowed him without wind, without sound, without direction—just an infinitely curved horizon, with no up or down, the painful visualization of the fourth dimension to process. But then...
He saw.
It was a ribbon suspended in non-space, vast as the universe, yet folded and undulating like a simple paper loop. It wasn't flat—it spiraled disconnectedly, crossing and inverting at impossible angles, as if time had been folded like fabric.
There, on the inner skin of this ribbon, a world existed.
Images. Scenes. Possibilities.
Himself, burying his ex-girlfriend.
Himself, crying beside Blizka.
Him, standing still, bleeding with no skin on his face.
Him, still a child, screaming his mother's name, as she lay dead on the floor.
And more:
A giant hamster, running along one of the curves.
A version of him on a nocturnal beach, holding Ketlen's hand.
Another, the two of them inside a plane flooded with water.
Further up—or was it further down?—he saw himself holding two babies, with Ketlen by his side, as if none of it had ever happened.
The first kiss—their first time—the first fight—the first...
The ribbon spun on itself, in spectral layers. Each fold, a layer of time. Each twist, a variation of himself.
He saw everything and felt everything—the emotions, the smells, the tastes of every version of his life. Layers of himself, in impossible realities, overlapped in a whirlwind: him, taking pictures of something in the middle of the sea; Nunes, before him, in a dark room; two identical Ketlen's staring at each other in the same chamber; and the camera, always the camera, firing another flash.
It was like looking into a song being played by a collapsing universe. A symphony made of versions of himself.
Time... wasn't running.
He wasn't falling.
His body was standing. Still. In the vacuum. And everything around him spun like a glass halo, fragmenting the reflections of his existence into a sequence of infinite possibilities.
Until something materialized.
A discussion.
He and Ketlen.
"I DON'T GIVE A DAMN,ASSHOLE!!!"
"Ketlen..." He raised his hands, afraid, slowly approaching.
"DON'T EVEN TRY IT, STAY THERE!"
"But..."
"I LOST EVERYTHING, I LOST EVERYTHING!!!" Her voice was pure hysteria, pain manifesting as fury.
... Nunes was there, just observing.
"But... it wasn't my fault... I helped you... I did a lot for you..."
"You shouldn't have even been born, you fucking bastard." The cruelty of her words was a blow.
And then, he saw. Not the Nunes in the conversation, but him. Ketlen had a gun in her hand. He felt it, felt that perhaps it was the first time he was going to do it—for himself. Nunes ran toward Ketlen, firmly gripping both the gun and her hand. But when she shot... The bullet hit his head.
POW!
CHAPTER 6: WHERE ARE THE MOUNTAINS?