-Chapter Five-

Expecting to feel the same unpleasantness as before, Milla was surprised when, after a moment of unsteady, shaking flight, she fell onto a solid surface.

She stood up, brushing herself off, and looked around. Immediately, she wondered if she'd come into his mind, or if she was still in the Collective Unconscious. This didn't look like any mind she'd ever seen at all.

Milla had broken into minds before. Most were complicated, twisted places. Or maybe that was just because most of the minds she'd been in were deeply disturbed. But this mind was so… well… it was empty.

She was standing on a flat plane that stretched seemingly forever. It was completely smooth, white with black and gray designs over it. There was no color. Above her was a stormy, opaque nothingness. Occasionally she thought she saw something drifting by, but the level of activity here was… well… there was no activity at all. No color. She'd never been in a mind without anything in it. Every mind had memories or thoughts or something.

She began walking, expecting at any moment to come upon something. But as she walked, the only thing she saw were new designs on the plane below her feet. It worried her. Minds were complex things. When she had been an active agent, breaking into the minds of madmen, she had come to know that all minds had a sort of bizarre organization, a maze of memories and thoughts and strange figures. While complicated, most had a sort of themed metropolitan inside them. This mind, aside from having no personality whatsoever, also wasn't organized. It was empty. There were no walls separating anything, not that there was anything to separate. Milla could feel panic rising as she walked. This couldn't be Sasha's mind. His mind would be packed full. She must have fallen into some weird part of his experiment. So the logical thing to do would be to float back up to the place with all the doors and try again.

She tried to levitate. At first it went as it always did. But then she began slowing down. And after a while she stopped, far below the stormy opaquity, but high above a vast landscape of white. No matter how hard she focused, she could not rise higher. The environment she was in refused to let her.

Panic gripped her harder. So she was in a mind. If she hadn't been surrounded by another person's consciousness, then her own powers shouldn't have limits, since they were derived from her own consciousness. This was a bad idea. She never should have come to this psyche.

Looking down, however, she felt slightly comforted. There was definitely some organization in the patterns. On the flat, white landscape were black designs. Squares, circles, fractals. Together, they made intricate pathways in white. Perhaps there was some sort of organization that Milla simply didn't understand. After all, Sasha thought much differently from her. And most minds she'd seen were insane. She was in a logical mind—and a psychic one. Of course it would be different.

She let herself float back down. As she did, she felt again comforted by a sound that indicated she was in a functioning mind after all—the loud, grating shrieks of "No! No! No!"

Milla threw a mental cloak over herself just in time. A small mental being hurried toward her, still proclaiming "No! No!" It was something all minds had—what the psychics called censors. They patrolled the mind in an attempt to stomp out anything that didn't belong. Hallucinations, mental illnesses. Or, in this case, Milla, who shouldn't have been in Sasha's mind. She was a foreign body. Naturally, Sasha's mind wouldn't allow her to be there.

Confused, the censor looked around. Milla continued to project a mental cloak over herself. The censor, unable to see her, eventually began to wander off. Milla hesitated, then followed it. Perhaps if she could find where it was coming from, she'd find something other than this vast emptiness.

It led her to a ledge. It didn't even hesitate. It walked right off the sheer, ninety-degree cliff. Milla hurried after it and looked down. It was walking horizontally downwards.

Confused, she put out her foot. The world suddenly wrenched around. She nearly puked. She was right-side up again, but sideways. She jumped over the cliff. The world turned with her. She jumped back. No matter where she stood, she was on the ground. She followed the cliff's edge; it came to a point eventually. She stepped over one cliff, then the other, then stood directly on the point of the three planes. She couldn't fall off.

She nearly laughed once she figured it out. It was a cube. A cube which, apparently, functioned as the exact center of Sasha's brain, much in the way the Collective Consciousness had had a definite center.

But this was a mind. It shouldn't have had a center, beginning, or end. And a cube was so limiting. And it was empty. Shouldn't the surface of this cube be crowded with memories or thoughts? So far, all she'd seen was a single censor, who she'd lost in trying to figure out the cliffs.

Remembering the censor, Milla turned back, away from the cliffs. She didn't like the idea of a cube with no up or down anyway. Having the world right itself was disconcerting, to say the least.

As she walked, suddenly the storm over her head changed. For a moment it turned light gray, and she saw flashes of images; a cabin, a chair, a waterfall that appeared to be made of a thick, oozing material; then it darkened again. Ah-ha. So Sasha was dreaming. Good…

Milla found the censor (or maybe it was another one) wandering dutifully across the empty white mindscape. She followed; he looked like he was going to the center of this side of the cube. And sure enough, Milla finally saw something; something she thought was perhaps marking the middle of this plane. It was nothing spectacular. It looked like some sort of weird pipe. It was rusted and rickety and not something Milla would have expected in Sasha's mind. The censor squeezed into it and disappeared.

Milla crept up to it. Was this pipe it? The only thing in Sasha's mind? Over her head, the clouds flashed an abrupt picture of a lounge chair with a row of encyclopedias lying on it; it was replaced with a one-eyed raccoon lying in the road.

Milla crouched next to the piping and tried to determine where it came from. Inside the cube. Did it go anywhere? In theory, she could fit into the tube; after all, there was technically no such thing as size here in the mind.

But instead she saw something even better. The pipe went into the plane. And in the tiny space between the floor and the pipe, Milla could see something.

Before she had a chance to stop herself, she grabbed the crack between the pipe and the floor and pulled. The floor broke away easily. And inside was a cache of boxes.

Milla laughed. "Sasha, you devil!" she said to herself. Sasha's mind wasn't empty; on the contrary, it was perfectly organized. Everything was stored within the cube. She hadn't seen anything because it was beneath her feet the whole time.

She began widening the hole in the floor. She wasn't worried. The mind was so infinitely vast that tearing down a few walls wouldn't hurt it. In fact, they fell down regularly, but the mind always fixed them. Opening a few hundred boxes wouldn't kill Sasha; he probably wouldn't even be aware of it.

Milla crouched by the hole and reached in. She picked up the box closest to the tube, which extended downward into the tightly packed boxes.

Milla examined it. It looked like a shoebox, but could hold anything. Printed on the side in neat letter, it said: "NEIN." That made Milla laugh. Only Sasha would be so petty, to label the contents of his own brain.

She peeked into the box, then, tearing off the top, turned it over. Incredulously, she stared at its contents. Shoes. That was it. The shoebox had a pair of black shoes in it.

She reached in and picked up another box. Identical. Same size, same shape, same "NEIN" label.

She turned it over. More shoes.

A third box. Shoes.

Milla sat back on her heels, concerned. Did this mean something? Sasha had never seemed to care very much about shoes. Why would his brain be packed with shoeboxes?

Milla began pulling out more and more boxes. The hole in the floor grew as she pried up more and pulled out more. She lowered herself into it, checking boxes and tossing them out. Shoes. More shoes. Neatly wrapped, shined, never worn before. Black. White. Gray. More black. Shoes, shoes, shoes.

With increasing horror, Milla dug deeper down. Here: a box without any shoes in it, only the thin paper used to wrap them. Here: a mismatched pair. Here: only one shoe. Here: a box incorrectly stamped "NIEN." Here: a pair with the laces done incorrectly, tangled and random. Was it just her, or was the hole getting larger?

She pulled herself out of it and looked down. Yes, it was larger. And was it just her, or were the shoes below getting bigger? No, it wasn't her imagination. It did get bigger. The perception was opposite. Farther in, it got bigger and bigger.

Milla stumbled back from the pile of shoes, terrified. If the cube got larger and larger the farther down, then there was no limit to it. Inside was an infinite eternity of shoes. But there was no center. The outside was the center and, with each row down, the inside expanded. It was like peeling an onion but having it grow bigger with each layer peeled off. And only a few rows down, the shoes stopped being so neatly put away. They grew mismatched and scuffed and confused. Milla felt sick. This wasn't the mind of a sane person. This didn't make sense. There were no thoughts or emotions. Just shoes.

Shoes. Of all things, why shoes? Just shoes.

While Milla crouched on the ground, trying to level her breathing, abruptly a dozen small censors came out of the tube. Milla immediately projected a mental cloak around her to hide. The censors scattered. A few stayed behind, observing the pile of shoes. After a moment they began repacking. She watched as the shoes disappeared into boxes and back into the hole. The pile grew smaller. Soon everything was neatly packed away, and the censors were already putting the floor of the cube back over it. Above her head were a few more flashes. A weeping willow with a man kneeling over it; a string of Mardi Gras beads; a dinner with her and some other psychonauts.

Milla stood and ran. She wanted out. But there were no doors. She had to leave. She'd seen enough. Sasha was crazy. Completely crazy. His brain didn't make sense. She was through with his consciousness. He was crazier than the craziest madman she'd ever seen.

She stomped on the floor. It opened a hole, but there was no exit. Only more "NEIN" boxes.

Almost crying, she kept running. She went over the cliff; the cube turned with her and she kept running. She passed another piece of piping and two censors standing by. She went over another cliff. She was trapped. Trapped! Trapped in an insane mind. What if Sasha woke up? Would she still be here? Would he realize she was here? Would her physical self be mindless for the rest of her life?

She nearly ran past the next pipe she saw, but didn't. Because this one was different. Beside it was a door. And a stack of boxes.

"Oh, thank you!" whispered Milla. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

She hurried toward it. Yes, this was the same door. It was purple, scribbled with notes. The boxes next to it were all labeled. NEIN. NEIN. NEIN.

She nudged them with her foot. They fell over. One opened, spilling its contents: shoes.

With a cry of horror, Milla yanked at the door. She stumbled into it and slammed it behind her.

No wonder Sasha never expressed any feelings. He didn't have any. His brain was filled with shoes. His brain was an inside-out cube filled with shoes. No wonder he was psychic. He was also insane. His brain wasn't normal. No wonder it had the power to blow things up. It didn't do anything else, except think of shoes.

Half-sobbing, Milla hurried around the circle, inspecting the doors for the one that would lead her out. Most were unopened, some locked, some labeled. Finally, she found it. A door labeled "LAB." She practically jumped into it. She felt exactly what she'd felt before: stabbing pain in her head, tugging and yanking, nausea.

And suddenly, with a heavy impact, she was lying on the floor of Sasha's lab. She was back in the physical world, back in her own safe mind. She stood up, feeling weak and unsteady. She stumbled over to the console and turned the knobs back. The equipment turned off, its hum disappearing. The lab was silent once more, except for the steady sound of Sasha's breathing. He was still asleep, his peaceful exterior betraying his madness.

-Fin-

(Author's Note: I know the ending is really, really open to interpretation and I don't want to give it away, but I hope you understand that Sasha's not really crazy; Milla just didn't understand what she was seeing. If you got this far, kudos to you! Now go review and I'll love you forever!)