Page 29 of Dark Shaman: Eternal Hope
"Not really, but it's polite to ask."
Nahil snorted. "There is nothing polite about my situation but go ahead. Touch me. See what we've become."
Eluheed hesitated. Every instinct warned him against making contact, but Navuh expected results. He put his hand on the soldier's forearm.
The world exploded.
No, it expanded.
Eluheed was suddenly pulled into something vast and interconnected, a web of linked minds that were trying to create a whole and act as a hive, but their efforts were chaotic, their thoughts jumbled. Not all of the time, though. They were like streams feeding into a river, but the river was muddy, not clear.
Eluheed tried to pull back, but he was drawn to the connection. He could feel their emotions, access their fragmented memories of the enhancement process, Zhao's drugs flooding theirsystems, the moment when the barriers in their minds dissolved, and they touched each other, and also something more infinite. They were losing their minds, but they weren't completely insane. Not yet. They were like individual drops of water, suddenly aware they were part of an ocean.
Aware of him.
Panic flooded through Eluheed.
He wrenched back his consciousness, reinforcing his mental walls and flooding his mind with the persona of Elias, the humble shaman. But the knowledge remained. He now knew how to access their network, how to slip into that stream of connected consciousness.
The physical world crashed back into focus, and Eluheed found himself on his knees, Navuh's hand on his shoulder, Nahil watching with a knowing smirk on his swollen lips.
"What did you see?" Navuh demanded.
Eluheed's mind raced, sorting through what he could safely reveal. "They're... connected," he managed in a shaky voice that he didn't need to fake.
"Is it telepathy?" Navuh asked.
"It's more than that." Eluheed rose to his feet on unsteady legs. "It's like...imagine if consciousness itself was an ocean, and we're all droplets in it. We think we're separate, individual, but underneath we're all part of the same water."
Navuh's eyes sharpened with interest. "Let's get out of here." He motioned for Eluheed to step out of the cell. When they were out of the section, he waved his hand. "Now you can continue."
"I'm just hypothesizing here, but I think that whatever Zhao did to their brain chemistry with the enhancement process dissolved some kind of barrier. A filter that normally keeps us separate." Eluheed was breathing hard, still recovering. "They can access that underlying ocean directly, and that's how they communicate, not by sending thoughts to each other but by meeting in that shared space. They are still new to this, and it's a mess in there, but they need to be watched because they are learning how to navigate these waters."
"Can they be blocked?" Navuh asked. "Separated?"
Eluheed shrugged. "I don't know. I'm not a scientist, and I don't know whether what Zhao did is reversible."
"This collective consciousness," Navuh said once they were back on the surface. "Could it be a delusion?"
"It didn't feel like a delusion." Eluheed rubbed the back of his neck with a shaky hand. "Some think that consciousness is the foundation of the universe, with the material world being derivative. But to me, it sounds too esoteric, too abstract to be taken seriously."
"Why couldn't consciousness be primary?" Navuh asked, again surprising Eluheed with how open-minded he seemed to be.
"Because if everything emerges from some universal consciousness, then why is there suffering? Loss? Pain?" Eluheed voiced doubts he'd carried for centuries. "What universal consciousness would choose to create such a harsh world?"
"Perhaps it's a feedback loop," Navuh said. "The universal consciousness creates the material world, but then that world becomes independent of it. It develops its own rules, itsown patterns. And the experiences generated—joy, suffering, discovery, loss—feed back into the unified mind, and then the mind creates more material worlds."
"You make it sound like a game," Eluheed murmured, forgetting for a moment that he was addressing the lord of this place.
"Because it is a game." Navuh's smile was cold. "The consciousness divides itself into players, sets rules, and watches what unfolds. Some players win, others lose, but the game itself continues."
"Then what's the point?" Eluheed asked, his frustration bleeding through his words. "If life is just a milestone in some larger game, why does any of it matter?"
"Because we're still playing." Navuh grinned maniacally. "And in every game, there are winners and losers. I'm obviously a winner. Perhaps somewhere there's a great scoreboard, tallying the points over countless life cycles." He trained his dark, intense eyes on Eluheed. "I would love to see my status on that cosmic scoreboard."
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NAVUH
