Reality 102

Having both paths open again, I took the one on the left; one that had the sounds of suffering in it. I was sure that this choice was a test of my courage, and I wouldn't fail it. Fake or not, I would go the hard way if it meant saving innocent people.

Climbing down a stone ladder, I found myself on a large platform rather than a tunnel. The platform was located in an enormous cave. In front of me, there were other platforms; some of them below and some of them slightly above the one I was standing on. There were also some bizzare pillars around, giving me creeps.

Looking ahead, I saw my 'friend', the book store man - Mr. Idris. He was on a remote platform, looking down... to the platform which Sena was holding on to.

I looked down from my platform, and saw that this cave was going very, very deep. So deep, in fact, I couldn't see where the bottom of it. If anyone fell down from the platforms, the outcome would be certain death.

"Luckily, this is not real." I said, but another voice inside me was thinking a bit differently...

"But... What if it is not?"

"Shut up, there is no way." I wanted to suppress my rather more pessimistic self. "You've heard those voices coming from both tunnels."

"Magic rules this place, remember?" my inner voice said to me.

While this internal fight was going on, I was looking around to find a way to help Sena out; also potentially figure out where the other people I've heard the voices of were. This led me to an easy yet shocking discovery - the two paths leading down to left and right from the previous intersection... They were both leading to this room! After all that thinking, now knowing that I had no real choice there... It made me experience a set of very complex emotional states that are hard to explain by words.

"Father!" Sena's cry for help echoed in the cave. I looked at her. She was struggling to hold on, and without external help, she would... eventually meet her not-so-good fate. There was no use waiting here.

I found a way down to Sena's platform. By jumping down to another platform just below mine, I could walk closer to her. The path wasn't dangerous since the platforms were close enough to each other, but I had no guarantee of being able to get back here once I jumped down to the lower platforms. But still, Sena had little time and I had no clear end goal anyway, so I jumped down to the other platform after little thought. I ran to the edge of Sena's platform, leaned down, secured myself and pulled Sena up by her arms.

"Ender!" she said, sweating. "You came back!"

"Came back from whe-"

"Daddy! Dad!" A small kid was shouting from above. I looked at him. He was leaning down from a platform above me, trying to have a better look. "You came back!"

"What sort of sick joke is this?" I asked. "When did I have a child!?"

"Stop being funny, I can't believe you!" said Sena.

Suddenly, the kid leaned further down from the platform.

"Dad, I can't see you! Are you still down there?"

"Hey, careful! You will fall down!" I shouted as loudly as I can. But my warning blended into the ambience and disappeared.

I was disappointingly right to warn... Soon after I said that, I saw the little kid accelerating down to the depths of the cave with nothing visible to stop him.

"No!" yelled Sena and ran to the edge of her platform in an attempt to catch the kid mid-air. The attempt was as stupid as it was futile - Sena found herself flying down the platform as well.

"NO!" It was my turn to shout. Simply yelling out loudly was such an underexpression of my trauma, but there was nothing else I could do. I couldn't simply deny logic and throw myself down too, right?

Or... could I?

"Of course not, you damned idiot!" I said myself.

"Wasn't that you who said there was no way this is real?" my thoughts were interrupted. A deep voice that I have heard in the tunnel previously spoke to me again. "Go on, jump. What is the worst that could happen?"

"I won't... die?" I said.

"I can't tell." the voice replied.

I looked down from the platform and backed away a little.

"It became real all of a sudden, didn't it?" the voice asked.

"I am afraid." I said. "It would kill me for real. These platforms are real. This cave is."

"But the people weren't?" the voice asked.

"But... Look, I did my best to protect them!" I said.

"You are missing the point, child." the voice said, calmly. "Reality is a representation of how you perceive the world - this test is designed to let you practise the mindset."

"So those people were not real?" I said. Right after that, I thought I heard something like a sigh, but not a clear one.

"If that is how you understood it, then they indeed weren't." the voice said. "Now, tell me, are you happy with the choice you made?"

"Both paths were leading to the same platform. There was no choice to begin with." I said.

"Oh, but there was." the voice said. "You only found pain and agony down here because you chose to."

"I would see something different if I came down from the right path?" I asked.

"There is no right and wrong, just differences." the voice replied. "And you didn't have to come down from the right or left path to make the difference, the paths are there so that it is easy to represent how it works. You just had to convince your mind of a different reality."

"So that would change the world I would see?" I asked.

"In a way, you could say that."

"This makes no sense. It doesn't work that way in real life." I said. "You see things the way they are because... that's how they actually are."

"Are they, though?" the voice asked. I didn't only disagree with that 'voice', but also I was getting tired of this. I didn't let 'him' talk any longer.

"Who are you, and why am I brought here?" I asked a bit angrily. "I just wanted to learn about this mountain house thing, what the hell am I doing here!?"

I felt a strong shock through my entire body.