Harrison Higgs

## Harrison Higgs aka "The Scientist"

### Allegiance

"Utopion is safe from the gods. My body, my existence, is like some repellent to them. As long as I live here at the nexus, Utopion is protected. The suckers at risk are those people who refuse to bridge–the “forgotten,” as I’ve heard them called. They live under the delusion that the world they knew can come back to them. But as long as the gods aren’t united, the omnium is here to stay. And it grows in strength. I have a fantasy of helping them, but as long as I am alive, I thwart the only threat to Utopion. The council has the length of my meager lifespan to eliminate the gods’ threat. They hope that their monthly omnium injections will buy them more time".

## Personal Status

### Students

Eve

***Listen to the audio version of this article:***

# World of The Fracture

*How the hell did this shit happen? Part 2*

The best thing about my view is the moonrise. Before, there was always some building blocking that first moment of arrival, when the sphere rises so bright and shocking it makes you feel like an ancient lover. That Lucifer. He insisted that my injections happen around the full moon.Titus, Eli–they don’t give a shit either way. And as long as the procedure is consistent, Eve is fine with the timing. The moon is bloody tonight.

Fuck, the sting never dulls. Oh, they make sure to stitch me up right away. Their healing serums are almost supernatural in efficiency; you can barely see the 240 incision scars on the back of my neck. A mark for every monthly omnium treatment, a kiddie version of bridging because my ruined body couldn’t handle the full operation. The narrative is that I fumbled the particle accelerator, but I believe I subconsciously erred with intention. A part of me was willing to give up my own life for a moment of interdimensional contact.

Survival should have felt like a win, but after I recovered I sensed that what I had done had irreparable consequences. The omnium was only the beginning. I felt a constant buzzing in the back of my head, I started dreaming of static swarms, and would wake with the feeling of cotton in my ears. Some entity had its eye on me–on us, and I was tethered to it. I shouldn’t have written about my experience. Eve found my blog and invited me to speak at a conference. I was never a fan of The Eagles, but “Hotel California” comes to mind when I think of my life now.

My gilded cage is a miniature biosphere and I reside within it, in a penthouse with an immaculate view and a fig tree at the center. I am the only human in Utopion. Aside from the routine torture, they keep me healthy and fed. Out of the four of them, Eve is the least complacent. For all the work that she has put into making it, I have never seen her *enjoy* her utopia. She’s always looking for the next threat. I am her way of getting “ahead of the problem.” I was here in my tower when the gods finally came. I call them gods because, well. Faceless beings from another dimension that want to smite us for our crimes.

Maybe I just had a strict father, but that sounds godly to me. For a moment, I left earth. I was a mote in a swarm of static. I sent myself to them the second I opened the portal, and now that they were on earth I was called to the home that I had unwittingly entered. I was part of their hive mind, which had the command *delete*. Nonexistence sounded like a relief, but I am a scientist. I am curious by nature. I needed to live. To see them. To study them. My curiosity was at odds with their command, a glitch in their collective intent.

They wanted to extract the omnium, and scrub the earth of all humanity. Kick it to another dimension, let some other god play games with the bluegreen beach ball. Sorry, gods. The force of their failure triggered a domino effect of natural disasters that wiped out nearly all life on earth. Edible plants turned toxic, season cycles could not be counted on. The omnium which had been studied and tamed shifted and swelled, turning colors and crystallizing and, I believe, fundamentally changing. (The council won’t confirm that. Seems the changed omnium is addictive, more volatile. I hear talk of lesser bridged gaining Network access with the new substance. Nothing like a class war to flip a utopia on its head.)

Anyway. When I sleep, I am in the hive. I try to record my dreams, because I believe they track god activity. The gods move in large and small groups, depending on where their energy was scattered during their failure. They arrive as spectres or swarms, until they appear as the subjects they once tried to destroy: humanoid, faceless. I see them hover over omnium sources and pull it from the earth, extracting and disintegrating the crystals until it neutralizes and dissolves into their static energy. The natural environment reacts to this activity, and I dream of fire, earthquake, and flood.

Utopion is safe from the gods. My body, my existence, is like some repellent to them. As long as I live here at the nexus, Utopion is protected. The suckers at risk are those people who refuse to bridge–the “forgotten,” as I’ve heard them called. They live under the delusion that the world they knew can come back to them. But as long as the gods aren’t united, the omnium is here to stay. And it grows in strength. I have a fantasy of helping them, but as long as I am alive, I thwart the only threat to Utopion. The council has the length of my meager lifespan to eliminate the gods’ threat. They hope that their monthly omnium injections will buy them more time.

No way I’m getting a vacation. But! There is an answer out there, and it belongs to the two questions that have been needling me for six years. Why did the gods wait until year fourteen of Utopion to stop what humanity had started? Why not destroy us at the beginning? And what the hell was the trigger?

–Excerpt from “Attempted Memoir Because I Am So Bored,” by Harrison Higgs aka “The Scientist”