[The Game] Distant Lights

(image by southerntabitha, used under a Creative Commons license)

A car appeared from nowhere, zooming past, belching out smoke, skittering on up the road which was appearing before it. Buildings were reconstructing themselves, streets materialising, cars popping into empty spaces and shimmering as though they were elements in a photo coming into focus.
'What the hell is happening?'

Chapter 5.1

"History is fables agreed upon"
- Voltaire

Press play.

And click.

At first there was only white noise. A screaming tunnel of sound, spinning and swirling like a bad 1950's special effect. Michael struggled to stay conscious, the nausea washing over him in waves. He felt his mind disassemble itself, molecule by molecule, thought by thought, memory by memory. He passed out.

'On yer feet kid' Gabriel's voice came from above him, an arm hauling him upwards to a standing position. He staggered, his hands grabbing on to Gabriel's to keep him steady.
Michael stood, his jaw hanging down, speechless, staggered.
'What the...?' he managed before being struck dumb again.
Around him, a shroud of white fog was receeding, and details emerging, shapes shifting and squirming. The outline of a building faded into view, it's beams, floors, windows and occupants rendering themselves into reality as he watched.
'Is this...?'
'The past?' Gabriel said with a smile. 'Yep. New York. 5th Avenue. July 21st 1975 to be precise' he said, glancing at a pocketwatch he had just pulled from a waistcoat pocket.
'Jesus wept. We're really in the past?'
'Yep. Well, you are and you aren't. What you're seeing is...' and here he paused, moving his right hand up and down, looking for the right words, '...a representation of the past. Well, no wait, yes this is the past. In so far as you can interact with it and alter the events that occur here. At great risk I might add.'
'But how is...'
'It's a visual representation, collated and collected from the memories of the past. Every painting, every song, every story ever written of this time is being uploaded into a mesh - from that mesh comes what you are now standing in: a moment in time, slipping into another moment of time, receeding from the last before it. Every human experience that happened at that time is being tapped into to form the fabric of what you see. Or what you think you see...'

His head turning and pivoting around him, Michael stared in disbelief. Where moments before there had been a void of insubstantial white space - almost the absence of space, now there were shapes and forms, loading into view. Trees spat themselves into existence, appearing where there had an instant before only been an empty space. A car appeared from nowhere, zooming past, belching out smoke, skittering on up the road which was appearing before it. Buildings were reconstructing themselves, streets materialising, cars popping into empty spaces and shimmering as though they were elements in a photo coming into focus.
'What the hell is happening?' he said, his eyes bulging as a skyscraper uploaded itself back into reality, floor by floor, body by body, girder by girder, what looked like electricty crackling at the edges of the build.
'"Reality" is being re-constructed: being pieced together from morphogenic memory fields...'
'Morphowha?'
'Morphogenic memory fields' Gabriel said with a manic smile that Michael was coming to know. It usually heralded an epic rant of excitable geekery. 'Think of it like this: imagine you teach a bunch of mice how to navigate a maze. Now imagine that ten years later, another group of mice, on another continent suddenly develop the ability to navigate the same maze. Without ever having been in contact with the original group. Somehow, the entire species has acquired the ability because just one member of that species has.'
'What...?' Michael barked, sufficently annoyed by what he's just heard to momentarily look away from what was happening around them and straight at Gabriel.
'They acquired the ability from the morphogenic field that the whole species shares'
'That's ridiculous' Michael said. A public park, with women sitting on benches took shape across the street. A bus passed, a staggered doppler-effect cutting the air as it passed, as though an element of a pre-recorded sound file had become corrupted and was now squealing in rage.
'Yes, it is. Utterly ridiculous. And all too real. Now imagine this; imagine that the human race also pumps out one of these morphogenic fields. Any memory, any moment, any place in time or space that any human being has ever experienced can be accessed from this field. Not everyone can access the field, but some of us, specifically the likes of me and you, can. What you're seeing now is the hardware - the field - re-assembling the programme from the wetware - us.'
Michael stared.
'And I can just move through time?'
Gabriel laughed. 'One thing at a time' he said. 'It's not quite as simple as all that'
Michael regarded him suspiciously. 'What do you mean?'
'Moving around in time is a dangerous business. You're not the only one out there. And not everyone is as friendly and charming as me'.
Michael supressed a snigger. 'You mean like those zombie things?'
'Yep - there's the zombie things. Then there's us. Then there's the independents - who do their own thing. And then, well, there's Claudia...'
'Claudia?' Michael said, the name ringing a distant and dusty bell somewhere in his head.
Gabriel sighed a moment, his eyes drifting across Michael's face. He paused an instant, thinking. 'Fuck it' he said finally, 'time for you to meet the Goddess.'
'The Goddess?'
'I'm joking. You know, "meeting with the goddess" and all that...'
'I really don't'
'Well, if you think this is weird, wait till you see this' he said with a slap of his hand on Michael's shoulder.
'Wait, no wa...'