Autumn stared in surprise as she and Heidi entered Miss Devons' classroom. There were twice as many students milling around as there had been the previous day. Word about the supernatural performance had spread like wildfire throughout the day. Apparently, everyone wanted to be a musician now.
Miss Devons looked at Autumn with a wry smile and a shrug. Autumn shook her head ruefully; she was pretty sure Heidi was going to get her choir now.
Principal Wiley came into the classroom behind Autumn and Heidi, with a high school boy and Aria in tow. She took him over to Miss Devons with a helpless expression on her face.
"This is Stefan," Principal Wiley told Miss Devons with a hopeful look. "He's our new German exchange student, but there's currently nobody here that speaks German. Tell me you learned some German while you were in Germany."
"A little," Miss Devons replied doubtfully. "I'm by no means fluent. He doesn't speak English?"
"Apparently there was a mix-up," Principal Wiley said with a sigh. "He speaks French. He was originally supposed to go to Quebec. I have no idea how things got so mixed up that he ended up here. He only speaks a little bit of broken English."
The young man spoke a few German words to Miss Devons with an inquiring look. She stared back at him helplessly, obviously not understanding a word he spoke.
"Sie spricht nicht Deutsch," Heidi told the young man in flawless German. "was brauchst du?"
He turned around to stare at Heidi in surprise, then began speaking to her in German. She replied without hesitation as everyone in the room watched with interest. He broke into a smile and the two of them spoke for over a minute before he nodded and walked over to the piano and sat down.
"You found a piano player, huh?" Autumn said with a grin.
"Uh hu," Heidi said with a satisfied grin. "He sings too. We'll have to do some German lyrics."
"You speak German?" Principal Wiley asked Heidi, staring at her oddly.
"Was it that obvious?" Heidi asked with a small smile.
Principal Wiley colored slightly, then laughed good naturedly. "Okay, that was a stupid question. Where did you learn German?"
"Here and there," Heidi replied vaguely. "Language is a pretty simple communication medium, so once you learn one, the others are easy to pick apart—especially when they stem from the same root."
"Oh absolutely true," Aria nodded with exaggerated enthusiasm. "Languages are easy peasy."
Heidi rolled her eyes at Aria. "Troll."
"Pixie," Aria retorted with a smirk.
Heidi quickly separated the spectators from those truly interested in participating, lining the interested parties up to one side. She then proceeded to 'augment' them, as Autumn thought of it. The room vibrated with small, inverted booms as Heidi made her way down the line, followed by gasps of amazement as the spectators watched in awe.
When she was finished, she asked Miss Devons to take over the orchestral students while she took the choir students to the stage room. Heidi had Autumn and Aria follow her, since they were familiar with the vocals in all of the songs.
After an hour of vocal training, Heidi took the choir back to Miss Devons' classroom. If the previous day's song had stretched the bounds of reality, this one shattered it. Localized discharges of auroral light danced around the members of the orchestra as their minds became part of a single superorganism.
The visions that came this time were so vivid that Autumn felt like she was a part of them. Discs flew through skies that were bluer than anything Autumn had ever seen. There were strange and unfamiliar animals roaming savannahs, including what appeared to be dinosaurs! Feathered dinosaurs, but still, dinosaurs!
There were pyramids all over the world. She viewed the world from hundreds of miles above, yet she could see every detail on the ground beneath her. The continents looked completely different. England was attached to Europe, and New Zealand to Australia. Africa was no longer tenuously connected to Europe and the Middle East—they were one landmass. Greenland was attached to North America, and the Atlantic Ocean was more like the Atlantic Channel.
The oddest part was seeing how narrow the Pacific ocean was as well. It was as if the entire world had shrunk, or an egg that had been cracked was putting itself back together.
As she stared in awe at the super civilization, cracks suddenly rent the earth apart and dozens of titanic beings tore their way out of the crust. With a kind of mechanical savagery, they destroyed every civilized structure they came across. In less than a few hours, they had destroyed a global civilization, leaving a trail of complete and total devastation. Even the flying discs were not safe from the titanic beings. They shot beams of light out of their eyes that incinerated everything they touched. Autumn could feel the stark terror in the populace as everything they had built was destroyed, including the majority of their population.
Once the devastation was complete, the titanic creatures slipped back beneath the crust as if it were quicksand.
The song ended, but the memory took much longer to fade. Finally, one of the students spoke up in a shaky voice.
"What were those creatures?"
"You call them Titans," Heidi replied, her eyes filled with some kind of suppressed emotion.
Everyone in the room was staring at Heidi in reverential silence. If those were Titans, then what about the gods of mythology? Autumn could practically hear the wheels grinding in their heads as they watched Heidi.
"What a bunch of blowhards," Aria broke the silence with a snort. "Good riddance."
A nervous wave of laughter rippled through the room. Principal Wiley and Miss Devons weren't laughing though—they were staring at Heidi with sudden recognition.
"Hayde's" Principal Wiley whispered under her breath.
Heidi's head whipped around to stare at her, eyes firing into full god mode. "Heidi, actually."
Principal Wiley swallowed hard and nodded, her eyes riveted to Heidi's like a mouse staring at a snake.
"LETHE," Heidi said with quiet power.
Everyone blinked, then looked around the room in confusion.
"So are we ready to play?" Miss Devons asked a little impatiently. "Time's a tickin…" she broke off as she looked at the clock on the wall. "What the...it was just four-thirty, wasn't it?"
"Time flies when you're having fun," Heidi told her cheerfully. "Don't worry, we'll all play together tomorrow."
Autumn peeked a glance at Aria, wondering if she had lost her memory as well. She found Aria peeking back at her with the same probing question in her eyes. She couldn't stop a relieved smile from crossing her face when she saw that she wasn't the only one who remembered.
As the three of them began the walk back to Heidi's house, Autumn decided to ask the question that had been on her mind.
"Heidi?" she started hesitantly.
"Yeah?" Heidi looked at her curiously.
"Um, how...well, I guess I mean why did those Titans destroy that civilization?"
Heidi blinked at her and came to an abrupt stop. "What are you talking about?"
Autumn shared a look with Aria, and Aria took over.
"The Titans we just saw wipe out that civilization while we were playing that song," Aria said slowly.
"You two remember?" Heidi asked in shock.
Autumn shared another nervous look with Aria before nodding. "Yeah. We saw you wipe everyone else's memory. I just figured you skipped us on purpose."
Heidi stared at the two of them like they were strange puzzle pieces that didn't fit. "I'm sorry, I didn't want you to have to remember the horrors of the past. I'm not sure why you two were unaffected though."
She went silent for a minute, and her eyes glazed over. When she finally returned, she let out a sigh. "I see. She doesn't want to be alone in her knowledge."
"Who?" Aria asked curiously.
"Never mind," Heidi said with a shake of her head. "Don't worry—I won't try to exclude you two anymore."
"So I was wondering…" Autumn said slowly. "You've said before that the planet is growing because some kind of energy grid is doing something to make our world three-dimensional. Why is it still growing?"
Heidi's eyes blazed to life as her god mode—a term which Autumn realized might just be closer to the truth than she had thought—kicked into high gear. Autumn shivered as the powerful presence flooded the space around her friend.
"I hate to admit it, but I'm not sure exactly how it all started," Heidi replied, sounding slightly annoyed at the admission. "What we believe may be the case, is that celestial objects are artificially created by some unknown entity. They are layered in two-dimensional stacks: plasma, sediment, then ice as the top layer—though that's an extreme oversimplification. An electrical charge is then applied which extrudes the objects into three-dimensional space. The properties and placement of each disk, as well as the voltage induced, vary significantly. We believe the desired result is a world more like Europa, where the layers remain intact. Here on Earth, the energy induction broke the layers, resulting in liquid oceans. The land mass, which was once beneath the ice layer, was extruded too much, resulting in the fractured continents you see today. The plasma beneath the sediment is ignited by the electrical charge, creating the state of superheated magma beneath the sediment. Gas giants like Jupiter are another example of what we believed are failed results. The sediment layer was unable to contain the ignition within the plasma layer, resulting in a complete breach. If the plasma layer were to completely breach Earth's sediment, the planet would immediately expand to many times its current size. Think of how much space a can of compressed air needs, compared to how much space is used once the air escapes. The sediment layer is what keeps the plasma layer compressed beneath the sediment."
"Wait a minute," Aria said with a worried frown. "What would happen if somebody drilled a hole past the sediment into the plasma layer?"
"Depending on the size of the hole, possibly the end of a liquid/solid world," Heidi replied with a shrug. "If the plasma layer ever escaped, it would ignite and vaporize the oceans and land masses. We would become a gas giant like Jupiter."
"That's reassuring," Aria noted with a shiver.
"Trust me, someone drilling through the crust is the least of your worries," Heidi assured her darkly.
"What do you mean?" Aria asked curiously.
"It's too soon to talk about it," Heidi said with a sigh. "She's not ready yet."
Autumn exchanged a look with Aria. Who's not ready?
"So what about Mars?" Aria asked, looking up at the moonlit sky. "It's all one piece. Where did it's ice layer go?"
"What do you mean?" Heidi asked with a frown. "It's ice is very similar to Earth's ice. Frozen at the poles with oceans and land in the middle."
"Oceans?" Aria repeated with a confused look at Autumn. "There aren't any oceans on Mars. It's a dead planet. There's nothing but rock."
Heidi stopped walking, her eyes growing distant. A moment later, she returned to the present. "Curious. They seem to be going to a lot of work to convince people Mars is dead. Too bad they can't rewrite their own history."
"What are you talking about?" Aria asked, a look of growing incredulity on her face. "Are you saying there is water on Mars?"
"Water, fauna, flora, everything we have here on Earth," Heidi nodded. "It looks like the people calling the shots didn't want a committee voting on every decision, so they kept the truth a secret from the rest of the world."
"This day just keeps getting weirder," Aria declared with a manic laugh. "I'm just waiting for you tell me we actually live inside of a computer program like the Matrix."
"We do," Heidi confirmed with a smile. "But this program is using programmable macro-materials as the shell, not a crude binary system processed over silicon substrates. You don't have a physical body in a tank on some physical plain jacked into a program either. You are the sum of your consciousness...sort of."
"Well that clears things up," Aria said dryly. "Do we have robot overlords keeping us imprisoned as well?"
"I doubt they are robots," Heidi answered, her eyes growing cold. "They share too many similarities with humans to be considered robots."
Autumn shivered at the obvious dislike in Heidi's frigid tone. A normal person expressing such dislike could never match the icy intensity that Heidi was able to communicate.
The conversation ended as they reached Heidi's house. As they entered, Autumn suddenly noticed that two women had been following a dozen feet behind them on the sidewalk. Both women had continued walking, but their faces were filled with shock. They must have heard the conversation. Autumn looked at Heidi curiously. She hadn't even glanced back at the women, which was odd, because she was usually aware of everyone in their proximity.