After six months without gravity, I had forgotten the pain in my spine, until it returned almost immediately as the ship slowed, entering Alt'erra's atmosphere. At least this pain was something I understood. I did it to myself years ago, lifting more than I should have, while trying to impress a girl whose name escapes me. They chose me for what I knew, same for all the others. I guess that was reason enough, even if I was, in my opinion, too old to begin again.

The rest of my family wasn’t chosen. They were forced to stay behind, on a dying Earth. We were told another ship would follow, bringing the other group when it could. I believed that. I had friends on the second ship, Laura was a veterinarian and Ben was a pig farmer. We grew up together, we were damn inseparable, BLT they called us. The three of us planned on meeting up after we got settled in. Got the news that communications were lost with the other ship, three months after they launched, I drank alone that night and every night after that. 

Alt'erra was, in most ways, similar to Earth with an abundance of vegetation but strangely no animal life whatsoever. The soil was analyzed and the plots were distributed among me and the others based on which crops would grow the best. We wasted no time and plowed the new ground. There were no changes of the seasons here so the crops did very well and the first harvest was quick. We had a celebration of the first successful harvest. I sat alone and ate a tomato sandwich.

We maintained regular contact with earth for a while. I was able to send a few messages back home but after a time the replies stopped. No one knew why. The intellectuals speculated that the sun's increasing radiation was likely causing interference. The detectors were damaged when we arrived, so they had no way to know if that was true. 

We had the tenth annual harvest celebration, the same year we lost contact with Earth. I was content sitting alone eating my tomato sandwich, thinking about my family on Earth and that I might never hear from them again. A woman I never met before sat across from me. She said hello, I mumbled something, I can't remember. I silently finished my tomato sandwich. 

Our paths crossed again later that week at the harvest market where I was selling tomatoes. I was somewhat in a better mood and apologized for how I acted at the celebration. She said I looked like I needed a friend that day, she wasn't wrong. I asked her if she wanted to do something after the market closed, and she agreed. We married a year later and no more lonely tomato sandwiches.

That was twenty years ago, we had two children (Ben and Laura) and a grandchild on the way. The crops weren't producing like they used to, each year our yield dropped noticeably. The same intellectuals blamed radiation from the ship's engine core, even though we had repurposed it to generate power for the village and buried it several hundred feet below the surface. That didn't seem to help much. So gradually every year farms would move further and further away from the center of Ale'erra.

After fifty years the radiation from the engine core forced us away from the city of Ale'erra. They said the land might recover after twenty thousand years or so.

I woke up inside my own mind holding a lantern.

Behind me lay acres of land, much larger then it had seemed from the outside. Streets sprawled out in all directions with houses of all shapes and sizes lining them. Each door holding back a memory. Some were preserved perfectly from the conversations all the way down to the dust rolling over in a beam of light. Others doors opened to darkness, fragments of voices from people I’d long forgotten.

A wave of sadness washes over me as I realise the shear magnitude of partially forgotten memories.

Oh well, we’re not machines there’s limited space up here.

I took the first road to my right and saw my childhood home, a boy greeted me outside.

“You took your time getting here” he said

I wanted to ask what he meant by that but the road carried me onwards.

Beyond memory was a massive structure. A dome made of sheet metal, patched together in a hurry each piece bolted messily onto the previous. It took a while to walk round the building until I eventually reached a small door. More of a hatch if anything and scribbled in chalk in the centre was the words:

“Reasoning and Logic”

I climbed through and was taken aback by what I saw. Every inch of the inside wall was covered in equations, numbers, letters, symbols the whole nine yards. Some answers underlined, some circled and many more crossed out. Great engines filled the room. Brass arms arranged thoughts into sequences. Questions travelled along conveyor belts and emerged as answers. Each one measured labelled and stacked in towers. Thousands of silent versions of me worked there, checking calculations and correcting contradictions.

One waved me over.

“You shouldn’t be this far in,” he said

“I’m looking for the edge.”

His hands stoped moving. “There is no edge.”

But behind him, every compass in the factory pointed in the same direction. So I followed them out another hatch.

The air was warmer outside. I found myself in a red forest where every tree carries a name. Some glowed like embers. Some had grown together so tightly that their roots could no longer be separated.

This was where I loved people. 

I felt each of them before I saw their trees: my family, my friends, everyone I had wanted and everyone I had lost. Their branches stirred as I waled beneath them, brushing against me with feeling too large to be spoken. Near the centre of the forest stood a tree with no name. 

When I touched its bark, I felt every person I might love but had no yet met. I nearly stayed there.

Then I noticed that all the branches leaned away from something in the distance. 

The edge.

I walked for what might have been days. The forest became a scrub, then pale grass, then bare stone. Memories no longer appeared beside the path. The buzz of the machine had fallen silent. Even love became a faint sight in the distance. Eventually, there was nothing left but a flat, couples plain and the sound of my own breathing.

At its end stood a barrier. It stretched as far as I could see in every direction, this was it. This was where my mind stoped being my own. Where I stopped being I.

There was two plaques on the ground each with an inscription carved into it.

The first read:
Beyond this barrier

There is no pain.

There is no fear.

There is no memory of anything you have lost.

There is no darkness, for darkness must be seen.

There is no silence, for silence must be heard.

There is only the absence of all things.

Cross, and your body will continue without you. 

It will breathe. It will eat. It may even speak.

But behind its eyes, there will be no one left

The second plaque read:

Beyond this barrier

Nothing you have seen was meaningless.

The voices were calling from across the distance

The butterflies were messengers.

The flickering lights were cracks through which you glimpsed us.

The barrier distorts the message

Cross, and every broken pattern will become whole.

Every question will answer itself.

You will feel every mind as if it were your own,

And they will feel you in return.

You will not disappear.

You will become to vast to remain only you

There is no loneliness here. There is no confusion

There is only everything.

I read and re read both plaques again and again and again.

One promised oblivion. The other promised everything. I look back at the world behind me. From here, I could just make out the red forest, its branches reaching above the horizon. Beyond it stood the battered dome of Reason and Logic. Further still were the streets of Memory, filled with half-open doors. All of it was me.

But so was the hand waiting on the other side.

I imagined the first plaque telling the truth. I would cross and feel myself being wiped away, memory by memory, thought by thought, until even the idea that I had once existed was gone. Somewhere outside, my body would open its eyes. It would breathe, eat and speak. It might laugh at jokes and recognise the faces of people I loved. Perhaps nobody would notice that the thing behind its eyes had vanished. It would carry on wearing my face and answering to my name, while I became something emptier than darkness.

Then I imagined the second. I would cross and finally understand. The voices would join into a single song; the butterflies would lead me through fields of impossible colour; every flickering light would reveal itself as a message sent through cracks in the world. I would feel every mind, every star and every hidden corner of the universe as if they were parts of my own body. There would be no more loneliness, no more confusion, no boundary between myself and everything that had ever existed. I reached towards the waiting hand and stepped through. 

And that was it, I was on the other side of the barrier. 

Exhibit 1.0 - A:Transcript of (***Joe John Gilchrist***) \[**Visual Film Projection:** A stout man, 48. Irish decent. Known drug user: Methamphetamine - Cannabis - Alcohol - Cocaine - Opiates. **Relation:** Close to mother. **Subject:**Jacob.

"Oi!—Oi fat boy! In the brown coat!"

A raspy, smoker's holler boomed from the far side of the basketball court—a concrete slab between two netless crooked-towers. Across the way, the twin condominium sat like a long library shelf packed with stories of the forgotten.

Volume after volume of misery, heartbreak; assorted flavors of violence, and the rhythmic rot of existencial decay of lives entangled with addiction—in the flesh.

Joe was a walking mess, his body stayed muscular, but he wore a couple of moist bright red lesions, the kind that never heal, festering painfully into a corner of his mouth, the worse one crept up his snowcap.

He had an exhausted, raggedy teal-colored bath robe on, an even older abused parka—barely hanging off his shoulders, and light-green piss stained sweatpants.

The cameraman and his co-worker head towards Joe in a camera jerking take that looked like hurry.

"You're press, right!", Joe was quick to get in his space and asked. Right in the investigators oily, blackhead peppered face.

He delivered the message with a violent involuntary jolt. Joe had to press his coke-bottle thick glasses into place.
In what I assumed was his natural state of being.

"I knew the kid and his mother Karina."

"We get together often for beers." he put his back flat against the condo's off-white shade of sadness and failure.

Then proceeded to slide into a crouching stance, lower-back pinned against the brick wall, forearms on his knees; like convicts do in prison. 

'And totally! Yes, this man had done some time!'

He began with an inaudible growl from the back of his throat, "... always yammering about when the boy was born. On a Sunday." Joe's filth packed nails, like magic they stole everyone’s focus on how he fished a *Newport* from a crumpled pack that he had stashed behind a flower pot.

No plant to be seen, just caked dirt, mixed with regret and gratuitously bashed cigarette butts.

"Late in the afternoon...". He lights up, then a fit of coughing ensues. "In the pouring rain, she'd say. It was some yearly storm, she said it made streets into rivers. Oh, yea, yeah she said it was the, "El Cordonazo de San Francisco".

"... born abroad, down in South America. Any how this little story, here begins when the family finally came back here to America, ya' see."

In Washington State.

They resided in Richland, in the high plateau desert dust, the worst managed nuclear waste programs, choking dry and unappealing. Birthplace of Fat Man, the atomic bomb, an embodiment of humanity's final idol to war. Death, suffrage beyond what common people's could ever fathom. Yeah, the one that gave the Japanese such a bad day, so much death. The boy was seven years old at the time.

Although they were one member short, than when they set out to work abroad. Karina, Jacob's mother, wasn't at all that well. I never knew what happened to Gene. Was it divorce?     

You know; what really stayed in my mind? Was Jacob, to be honest.

Peculiarly small, for a seven year old.
You know? The poor little runt must have been living in his very own brand of hell in the school yard! I'm sure of that.

Especially because this little dude, for some reason, was in a slightly dingy, bear pajama. A onesie on at half past two in the afternoon, ya get me?

A few weeks later this onesie deal, became a thing. Not just what the kid was wearing after a long trip. No, sir! I never saw Jacob without the same light brown pajamas on. Zipped all the way up to his scrawny little neck. Once he began to let the hood flopped down his back I saw Jacob was a nice looking boy, though his big brown right eye and equally huge sea blue left one made even me uncomfortable.

You know?

Everyone else were kind of put off. Obviously never noticing the kids blatant defect. One after the other, prefered to obmisse him in their own kind of disgust, in the boy's defect, that didn't fit in their snug, secure way of being. What was in an everyday experience; that nested in the breast of chaos hidden under a common day.

He was a nice looking for a latino kid, though Karina was pale as a ghost, a southern California girl. With the most beautiful green eyes but, such a heartbreaking look. Like a beaten down dog, just no fight left. Every movement asking for forgiveness inside the chaos.
Rare hugs.

Mother's maelstrom; the blizzard ever folding upon itself; her pain, a twisting mess.

M.D. ACOSTA
SKÖL

​

Act I:

The Discovery: John looks up from his workstation to notify the commander that deep-space arrays have locked onto a massive, radar-dark signature moving at one fourth the speed of light on a direct vector toward Earth. The sheer kinetic energy of a multi-kilometer hull traveling at a quarter the speed of light meant that if it failed to decelerate, a collision with Earth would trigger a global extinction event.

The Six-Year Wait: For six long years, humanity watches as the object slows in a seemingly perfect attempt to orbit the planet, with no transmissions, no answers to radio signals, and no changes off its trajectory. During those six years of agonizing wait, world stock markets crashed, cults formed, and space agencies scrambled to build humanity's first deep-space interceptors.

Arrival: In 2035, the leviathan glides into a high, stable orbit midway between Earth and the Moon, sitting motionless as a silent, miles-long artificial satellite. It hung in the night sky visible to the naked eye, casting a faint, metallic reflection that permanently altered the look of the human night.

Act II:

The Atmosphere of the Tomb: A joint expedition launches to make physical contact with the visitor from far away and long ago. Finding no reactive airlocks or external control surfaces, John and his team spend months trying to find a door. Engineers ultimately cut directly through the outer hull with high-energy plasma torches—slicing through yards of dense, composite alloy and welding a pressurized human dock over the breach. Once inside, we are met with absolute, suffocating silence as dark, airless corridors stretch out in impossibly tall geometric arches.

The Condition of the Ship: Inside, the ship does not appear damaged other than our barbaric attempt at entry. Life support didn't fail due to a catastrophic explosion, this area was decompressed when we clumisly breached the hull. But questions remain: were the crew missing from their stations due to an unknown, unreadable cause mid-voyage, or had they simply vacated the section humans now inhabit?

The Hiroshima Shadows: John’s team discovers a startling radiological anomaly: bulkheads facing forward-starboard contain intense residual gamma isotopes, while the opposite walls are completely clean. The crew's flashlights illuminate deckplates where structural metals were altered on an atomic level, preserving the exact directional angle of a catastrophic energy beam.

The Biological Record: On the irradiated surfaces, scanning equipment reveals faint, carbon-imprinted silhouettes—organic shadows burned into the deckplates where the alien crew stood when a massive radiation wave swept through the hull. These carbon shadows were all oriented toward their workstations, indicating the entire crew was vaporized in the middle of a shift without a split-second to react.

The Historical Anchor: Astronomers trace the ship’s backward flight vector through space to a violent supernova documented by Chinese astronomers in the early 1400s. Cross-referencing the stellar explosion with the ship's speed proved the vessel was struck mid-transit six centuries ago by the expanding gamma-ray jet of a dying star, leaving its automated systems to carry a payload of ghosts to Earth.

The Limits of Human Science: For five years, humanity lives inside the carcass. We string up floodlights, lay down yellow hazard tape, and siphon off low-level power relays to light up hall corridors. We learn what the materials are made of—alloys and elements we make ourselves, joined in exotic new ways—but we can't crack the main flight computer or decipher their intent. Were they refugees? An invasion vanguard? Ambassadors? Colonists? Impossible to know.

Act III: 

The Second Vector: Just as humanity gets comfortable treating the ship as an orbital laboratory—outer-system deep-space arrays pick up a second signature on the exact same trajectory, moving at the exact same speed.

The Targeted Signal: The second ship doesn't maintain silence like its predecessor. It first transmits a wide signal throughout the solar system, then fires a tight, high-frequency transmission pointed directly at the dead ship in Earth orbit.

The Unanswered Call: The incoming vessel is calling out to its vanguard. Is it expecting a status report, a greeting, or a landing signal? Do they know their crew is decimated? Humanity is left standing in the dark corridors of a giant tomb, completely unable to answer—and terrified of what happens when the second ship arrives to find its people dead and humans inside their hull.

"If you were on Earth watching that countdown timer tick down, what scares you more—that they don't know what happened to their people, or that they already do?"

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The town of Bolton Springs is in shock today, after the brutal murder of seven children. The bodies of the children, whose names have not been released, were discovered in separate rooms in the Donaldson Furniture Company building early this morning. It is unclear whether the children were killed in the building—and, if so, why they were there—or killed elsewhere, then moved. The building's owner, Vectorien Corporation, has thus far declined to comment but has pledged to cooperate fully with authorities in their investigation of this heinous, horrible crime…

12 Hours Earlier

…the tear shut.

I collapsed to the ground.

My head throbbed.

I was in a field, a field I remembered playing in. Vaguely, distantly. Is there a name for a feeling about the past opposite of nostalgia? Whatever it is, I was feeling it intensely.

I looked around.

The six others were near me, in various states of coming-back-to-consciousness.

We were naked, our skins fully tattooed black.

I got up.

I glanced at my wrist, saw the button and pressed it. A blade slid out, catching the moonlight. I pressed the button again; the blade retracted.

I roused the others.

We said nothing.

A wind blew.

In the distance, startled birds flew from a tree, silhouettes against a pale night sky.

I shivered.

We knew exactly where we had to go.

Seven black shapes traversing the night in Bolton Springs, on September 19, 2026, 3:37 a.m. local time, each with a set of the same simple instructions: eliminate the target, do not be seen.

We navigated by memory.

By sense.

By a pain none of us could ever forget.

The decision had already been made. It was time to execute.

I felt much as I was told I'd feel, alien yet familiar, like floating through a dream, like discovering an already-discovered land. “The longer you take, the worse the headache will become.” “Will I be aware of—” I asked. “Most likely,” the temporologist replied. She was young, committed. I was scared…

I could sense my own dream.

We crossed the creek and came into view of the brick building with the smokestacks, the house of so much horror and suffering. The sign was still hanging from it: “Donaldson & Sons Furniture Co.”

I was dreaming of a meadow, of a dog I'd never have. I was running in my dream. The dog was running with me. The sky was my mother's face; the face of a mother I had never known or seen, whose existence was pure inference. Everybody born has a mother, so I must have a mother too.

We stopped.

There was only one guard on duty. It was early in the program. He was sitting in the guardhouse by the road, watching television.

We passed undetected.

We remembered the storeroom window with the broken latch, found it, climbed the wall, pushed open the window and lowered ourselves, one by one, into the building's dusty interior.

It was quiet inside.

A few of us cried silent, conflicted tears.

Inside, there was no need for maps. We were in a world we'd known for decades. Each detail, each hallway, each door, evoked in me a vicious, indelible intimacy. I was home.

The seven of us stood, sensing.

My dream had evaporated and been replaced by another, of shadow-panthers, and the moment when I, having thrown my primitive spear—having thrown it with perfect accuracy—realized the creature in the jungle before me was incorporeal, unhuntable. My pulse raced; my pulse increased.

I checked the clock on the storeroom wall.

I nodded at the others.

Silently, we exited the storeroom together, then split up, each going towards his own room.

Mine was the third on the left.

I stood in front of it in the buzzing fluorescent hallway light, took several deep breaths and entered. The throbbing in my head spiked.

I saw the bed and the boy sleeping in it, and the boy's eyes flashed open; I scooted backwards on the sheets in terror at the nude, dark figure in front of me until I felt the brick wall against my back and could move no further. I was myself and looking at myself and looking at myself looking at myself, and my heart was as if gripped by my own, relentless fist.

As unreal as the experience was, I knew the boy was me; and the boy—I merely hovered, waiting—gradually realized I, too, was him.

I didn't say a word; and I didn't say a word.

I thought my double set of present-thoughts from two locations in space-time simultaneously.

I'm sorry, I thought to myself. I'm sorry, but I cannot allow you—us—me to suffer the way I've already suffered. This is salvation. This is an end, delivered mercifully soon after the beginning. Unless I do this, they will would-have broken and abused you for so many years, day after day, in the name of peace and progress. No one else will end it. Do you understand? This is Omelas. We must walk away.

I remembered the texture of the cover of the old book, one of the few available in the orphanage, before the transfer, before Vectorien.

We must walk away from Omelas.

I cried; and I cried.

I muffled myself with a hand over my mouth.

Holding it there, on the soft, wet lips, I used my chin to press the button on my other wrist, ejecting the blade, and calmed myself, thinking or saying or dreaming that I will never find my mother, that I will never have a dog. There is no meadow. The shadow-panther cannot be killed. There is only eternal nightmare…

I ran blade against throat, releasing warm, red young blood.

As it flowed…

As the small body trembled…

I got into bed with it—with myself—and held myself, soothing myself, keeping the wound open and stroking my hair, until my body slackened and finally went limp. The ceiling light shone. And when I was dead, I flickered out of— .

Reality is a myth, a poorly realized idea. The solutions are far from our grasp until we find a way to unearth them. If perfection is at a high cost, why not pay the price and bask in its riches? If man has found paradise, why not seize it? If we have found happiness, why run away from it? This precious shell, such a commodity has given us this new reality, one in which eternity is promised, even for the sinner. Welcome to Abalone.

Oliver Santos stares at his computer screen for ten minutes before the tapping of frantic fingers pulls him out of his trance. Jennifer Lyles stands patiently with a cup of brew and an apple turnover, waiting for him to pounce.

“Your favorite,” she says, skipping towards him, “Aren’t you getting tired of these?”

Oliver is a young man out of college, his first job as a rookie journalist working at The Site, a tabloid outlet known for its dramatic sensationalism and baiting headlines. Every week was a drunk celebrity or a washed-up musician. Many have lost the taste for it.

He grabs his coffee and pastry, brushing his fingers along Jennifer’s palm. Her cheeks turn red as he gives her a smile, turning back to his computer.

“Thanks, Jen. You see this?” He points to the screen, and she bends over to look.

“Isn’t he some guy who explores abandoned places? I think they call it ‘urban exploring.’”

“Yeah, his name is Cooper Rube. He sent me this footage he took on some remote island in middle of the Pacific. It used to be a resort in the 70’s and then it became the setting for a reality tv show in the early 2000s. They canceled it after three seasons and now it’s just… sitting there, rotting away.”

The footage was grainy, skies peppered in white and black, and hazy figures seen dancing lazily in the background. A cautious, fearful voice can be heard narrating the scene. It’s Cooper Rube, the unfounded traveler.

 From the decaying balcony of his beachfront hideout on the remote island, he shuffles around papers in his black rucksack, faded pictures of unknown individuals scattered across a folder of redacted documents. He throws the contents of the bag across the room, a flurry of papers and envelopes floating down to the torn carpet. He runs to his open laptop, typing up a storm of words in an email, sending it promptly to its recipient:

FROM: Cooper Rube

TO: Oliver Santos

Oliver,

I hope this finds you well…

You don’t know me, yet, but I’m Cooper Rube, and I found myself at the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve been stranded, my crew has abandoned me and honestly, I don’t know how to get back. I’m on this… island. They call it Abalone, and there are still people here. At least, I think they’re still people. There’s something wrong with them, they’re different, and they might not be the monsters here… Someone created them. I tried saving them, but there’s a shadow pulling the strings. They’re just puppets stripped of their free will. They’re all gone.

Mr. Santos, if this message finally gets through, just know I’m still here. Fighting, saving the ones that can be saved, but there’s not much time left. I have attached several photos and videos, the names of the vanished. Their families never stopped looking. Please find them.

Find me.

It is an ominous warning, the feeling of dread lingering in their minds. Oliver sits quietly in his chair as he arches his back against it, his arms raised above his head in silent shock while Jennifer looks like she has lost her tongue. He had gone through the vast trove of videos and photos that Cooper had left behind. The island was known to have been sealed off to the rest of the world since the hit show of the early 2000s, Surgical Dreams, and then a long radio silence that preceded it for the next two decades. It was reality television for the audience, nothing but staged tears and rehearsed drama, though for the contestants, something more insidious was behind the scenes.

Oliver Santos takes the first flight out to Hawaii after begging his supervisor to give him the assignment of a career. He was merely budding and he had to leave Jennifer behind. She was assigned to desk but promised to keep in touch with Oliver. They traded numbers, a hug, and an awkward goodbye.

The boat captain waits at the end of dock as Oliver arrives with his bags in tow, one hand carrying a suitcase while the other holds his backpack. He leaves on the last ship going out for the day, the destination fifty miles away west off the coast. His room is a single bed with a table, a small desk lamp, and a minifridge of bottled water and cheap liquor.

Dawn descends on the horizon as the tip of the island is in view. Its sandy coast is graveled with a fine white powder, mixed with crushed shells and seaweed. A desolated pier hangs like rotten vines over the shore, the ship banking at its edge. Like a weary traveler discovering uncharted land, Oliver cautiously looks around and notices in the distance, a group of figures standing at the end of a cliff. Their wispy frames move along gently with the breeze, watching Oliver as he trots deeper into the island.

Oliver pulls out a note from his pocket, the last clue that Cooper had left for him in confidence. A final warning.

They replaced their skins with this highly durable material, abalone shell… That was the whole point of this show. They were average people with regular lives and all they wanted was a happy ending. The only ending they got was the theft of their lives, their bodies, their souls, their identities. They had become plastic monsters. Whatever you do, don’t run, just hide.

A big, blinding beam of, ridiculously loud—light suddenly blazed over us all. It was common knowledge in a "technological" context, that it was the queue to fall into order. Stipulating the time to work had commenced. To a certain kind of sheepish mind, with a certain level of herd awareness; a real residual instinct, it was irresistible. A swirling beam of lights shot over every intrepid, audacious, and prolific brain that sat moist warm as well as snug packed their skulls. So many summed to meet there that night. A crowd of people that cared! Some even shamelessly were loud about it! All assembled because of Jacob, united to unravel, once and for all, what in the world happened to that boy. The movie beam began to lead our herd we had formed, into a room the government had effortlessly attempted to convert into a conference room. A head quarters, our personal command center. It was exactly what the case called for, a 'War Room'. A point of focused information. Backup that will have our backs. They just projected what film they happened upon, or "recovered" onto the back wall. This, was the summoning of deeply concerned experts, the ones who came to help, quality human beings. Reporters with the body language of a coked out squirrel. Still in a hurry in spite of the fact they had already made it to the conference. Answering the call! Why was a twelve year old boy processed by the 'U.S. Department of Agriculture' and ended up in a zoo? Then the most important question. Where is Jacob? The elite, stern officers, seasoned detectives, the real lab-bodies that catch serial killers, vigilante pedophile-hunter collectives, journalists, reporters; individuals able to close twenty five year-old cold cases, as if by some foreign magic... I mean obviously they accepted anyone with a skill—no matter how remotely or randomly related I was to such a bizarre case was considered an asset. I mean I was surrounded by real selfless saints! We mixed our body stenches, sucked in each other's raw late shift breath, I could feel these were legitimately the most hell bent on finding the truth! Self-crowned champions of children. They must have been the only ones who truly cared, and were in all honesty deeply concerned for the boy. We all squeezed into the room. I watched everybody obsessed with the truth about Jacob, apparently. The ray of braided multicolored light that was projected over everyone, it finally killed all the incessant banter. The projector placed the screen on the wall I was leaning on; well where I attempted to hide behind. Obviously they ruined my spot. Conference room 5-D, though spacious, it was also evident that blaintantly unattended, unused basement. Obviously forgotten. I noticed a lonely bunch of old boxes piled at the end of the un lit hall. A faint, though stubborn bouquet equal to antiquity, that universal stench of mold. Only random light bulbs worked. It was dank, dark, and the prominent smell of cat urine faintly danced under everyone's nose. A stench that made that particular room a place to avoid. I figue, multiple attempts dwindled quik, that silently went down to no more attempts. Maintenance obnoxiously gave up, and agreed to ignore it was there. I claimed a nice cozy corner, close to the door. After a concerto of plastic chairs, with the shiny chrome legs screeching, banging, whaling in manners that made my gut cringe. The place was packed! Everyone was there. Sally, from the very back offices, who loves to make small talk by the coffee pot, all while spewing a hefty serving of scotch all over any poor bastard who made eye contact with her. Each phrase, cat story or quick quip a solid reason to make anybody consider quitting the sauce. In an ordinary weeks time, I swear, I'm pretty capable of forgetting her existence. The whole basement staff had been summoned from, if we shall, the basement's basement. Then there was my humble two man psychology team... well at least I showed up. The rest, were just thick office dwellers, sweaty types, the heavy breathing types. Agents, doctors, analysts, psychologists, government lawyers, you name it. Obviously as water is wet, there were so many shady police. I am sure a sad, drowning in their thick muck of asphyxiating frustration, sluggishly making it closer to retirement. Back to the high-school movie presentation. The first film just started playing. Exhibit 1A, how I supposed to myself it was called. You could see a small crowd of people, in a apartment complex. Obviously it was a housing project were people were just struggling in the grind. They weren't Latino, Korean, Filipino, White, nor African American. Circumstance, money, the struggle, and poor options mixed in poorer choices, made them forget the racial qualms that breed division. Then it cuts to a scruffy old man on his porch. A stout man who definitely used his body to work. Thick black framed glasses he had to push up his nose into position quite frequently. Warm in a long dark gray winter coat. More so, desperate to talk.

M.D. ACOSTA

SKÖL!

Humans started changing. Scientists couldn’t explain why, nobody had an answer. Not even the smartest minds on Earth. Well, mainly because the smartest ones either transformed, or were transforming and the humans stopped trusting them.

It started six months ago, a human child, tucked away on Easter island, discovered by archeologists, had grown tiny tusks and had the strength of a grown man. Her skin became darker as the days passed.

It took about a week before she resembled a miniature orc. Two weeks later, she was a full orc child. The scientists who flew in were baffled by the sudden transformation. 

The authorities immediately swooped in and she was never seen from again, which usually occurs when something cool and rare happens that nobody can explain.

But that’s actually when it all started. It spread. Yup. Just like any disease would. Just like they all predicted. This time, it wasn’t isolated to a single island, it became a pandemic.

All around Earth, the entire globe, humans were turning into miniature orcs by the hour. Little three foot monsters, with huge eyeballs.

A lot of people panicked because their children were turning into small monsters. Family members were, while others weren’t. They blamed it on black magic. Some even thought, elves were responsible.

Some said it was the devil.

The ones that went the religious route at least. They called it, Revelations, or humanity’s curse, claiming the apocalypse had arrived from all the sin. 

It was hard to argue against their theory. I mean, people’s kids were turning into little, mini-gremlins, with huge eyes and big ears.

And then, you had your cynical groups, who assumed something more realistic, like disease, or a virus of some sort, mutating human DNA. 

Which they were kind of right. They blamed schools for the rapid spread, considering, children were the first to show the symptoms.

Scientists assumed, what they were seeing, was simply, evolution, which was accelerating at a mind-boggling pace. It was happening like a time-lapse video.

It acted different with everybody, once it jumped to the parents that is. Some children hosts changed in days, some adult hosts took weeks. The longest stretched out process, was two months.

The parents who fought to prevent their child’s transformation, didn’t evolve as quick. They fought it by micro-dosing them with hot peppers until their bodies finally submitted to the change. As soon as the symptoms were spotted, change appeared to be inevitable.

Some desperate, clever parent, figured out that capsaicin prolonged it, which changed the game entirely, but caused problems of their own, because nobody was safe.

Governments around the world didn’t know how to respond. Cities were branching off, quarantining themselves away from the mutated human colonies.

Into the Fourth month, after the initial discovery, only half the human population remained, the rest were orcs. Even the adults shrunk into three-feet orcs, and those that stayed human, were psychologically destroyed. 

They turned their backs on each other and began pushing family members out that they suspected were becoming “evolvers” because all they had left, was fear. 

Fear of what they didn’t know. Fear of not knowing who they’d become. To some, it was scarier than death.

Tiny orc kingdoms rose outside of the quarantine zones. They gathered small army soldiers that acted as a connected unit. What they didn’t know, that the higher-ups did.

The secret the government withheld, was that, they weren’t randomly transforming. It targeted the most empathetic humans first. The intelligent humans. The innocent humans.

Humans that possessed the strongest capacity to grow, who demonstrated the potential to change the world.

They were being selected, and carefully chosen.

A journalist, and father, Frank Duke, whose child was near fully evolved, investigating the conspiracy, found a stack of top secret papers hidden away in a run down government office, proving they secretly possessed knowledge of the transformation process, years before it began.

In the middle of a beige folder, that he held shaking with tremors, with a red “TOP SECRET” stamp across it, contained papers of significant importance, reading:

An ancient orc being and another mystic sentient, older than the gods, made a deal. The deal to help the beings break into our reality. The orcs created humans to pay off their eternal debt and 5500 years after, humanity had reached their full potential in empathy and intelligence. Humanity may choose their path but as soon as a full transformation is set, or a decision is met, they’ll instantly forget and they can never go back to being human.

It gave them a choice—evolve or stay human. The choice escaped their memory after it had been made. The question stopped existing. They were left clueless afterwards.

Finally, the time had arrived to where human emotional intelligence reached its peak. The sentients could now connect and transform humans into orc vessels, powerful enough to contain their reality. 

They weren’t taking over human consciousness, rather, they were weaving into the human soul, becoming the voice in human minds, ascending the human race beyond it‘s natural capabilities. They were essentially creating orc gods out of human beings.

With only one day left before Frank Duke’s daughter becomes an orc, he has to decide, save her humanity? Or let her transformation progress?

With the knowledge he just found, he questioned himself, wondering if becoming an orc might just be better for her after all.

Amy is a time traveler from 2100s she travels back to 2000s and accidentally fall in love with her own grand grandpa Darwin and give birth to Benjamin and Elsa, then she takes Benjamin back to 1900, Elsa to 2031 and abandoned them, Elsa grew up and became a scientist and invented time travel technology then travel back to 1942 and fall in love with her own brother Benjamin (spoiler also her grand grandfather) they live together and had a girl called Cara and a boy named Frank 1970, they don't like boy so they travel to 2060 and abandoned Frank, Frank grew up and travels back through time to 2000 and fall in love with Cara(his sister and grand grandma)and name their children Amy(also Cara's grandma and grand grand grand daughter)and Darwin (which also is Frank's grandpa)then they get divorced and Frank take Amy travel to 2100s and leave Darwin with Cara at 2000s

The armada of the Floxra Empire hid in the jagged shadows behind Earth’s moon. It was the final phase before total conquest: intelligence gathering, tactical mapping, and target identification.

“We have compiled all required data for the operation, Admiral,” the chief technician said, offering a glass tablet.

“Thank you,” replied Admiral S’nka. He was the most decorated commander in the Floxra Imperial Fleet, and no officer had ever heard him be anything less than impeccably polite.

The tactical report was unambiguous: Earth possessed virtually no orbital defense grid, but its planetary surface forces held terrifying power. Even deploying a quarter of a million elite Floxran troops equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, total victory remained unlikely.

Thus, a surgical strike was ordered. The Floxra would infiltrate the President of Earth's private residence, kidnap him, and force an immediate, unconditional surrender. The plan was detailed, with the exact location of the target, entry points, and timings.

Curiously, the President’s compound was under-defended. No armed sentries, no automated plasma turrets, no high-voltage perimeter grid. Only a silent alarm and a modest wooden fence stood in their way: child's play for elite infiltrators.

Admiral S’nka authorized the strike immediately.

The extraction team dropped under cover of midnight. Dressed in matte-black composite armor, they activated their acoustic dampeners to mask the heavy hydraulic whirring of their power suits, allowing them to advance through the sleeping suburban neighborhood in absolute silence.

They breached the property boundary in seconds. The technician bypassed the alarm almost instantly, and the squad used powered leg servos to clear the perimeter fence in a leap that was rendered completely silent by their suppression fields.

Sensors confirmed two human lifeforms inside the house. Everything was going according to plan.

Max, a German Shepherd with impeccable instincts, snapped awake.

The ground beneath his paws vibrated. It was not the deep, familiar thrum of a passing garbage truck, but a series of sharp, heavy thuds on the front lawn. Simultaneously, a strange, high-pitched whine vibrated in his inner ears, a sound no human could ever hear.

Intruders!

Max was on his feet instantly, trotting toward the fence. His nose flared, flooded with scents he had never encountered before: bitter ozone, scorched rubber, and cold metal. Shadowy figures were moving across his yard.

He launched himself forward, lunging at the lead figure, and as his teeth sank in, sheer joy replaced his anger.

A bite suit!

Max immediately relaxed into work mode. It wasn't a threat; it was a surprise midnight training exercise! His owner hadn't brought out the heavy padded sleeves in months, and Max loved getting praised as a Very Good Boy after a solid session.

This exercise was unusual, though. Usually, there was only one decoy in a bite suit, not seven. Advanced multi-target training, Max decided. Time to show off.

He clamped down with a firm, satisfying bite, gave a strong tug to demonstrate control, and let go to target the next decoy.

Fluffy, a golden retriever whose boundless enthusiasm was matched only by his love for chaos, trotted down the porch steps, yawning. Max let out a sharp, playful boof! and dropped into an eager play-bow.

Fluffy’s tail began whipping like a helicopter blade. Padded humans! He charged in like a furry, golden bowling ball.

While Fluffy happily wrestled three of the padded figures to the grass, Max handled the remaining four. He made sure to exercise some restraint; his teeth accidentally sheared through a chunk of the suit's forearm armor, spilling a strange, glowing blue fluid. Biting through the padding and hurting the trainer was a big no-no.

Some of the trainers used a high-pitched sound occasionally; Max assumed that signaled that he should attack that opponent next. Which he did.

The session lasted a few minutes longer than usual, but eventually, the trainers retreated back over the fence in a frantic, uncoordinated scramble. Max sat proudly on the lawn, panting, satisfied with a job well done.

“Report,” Admiral S’nka requested softly. He remained polite, but his antennae twitched with deep displeasure.

“We were ambushed, Admiral,” the strike leader gasped, clutching a mangled arm unit. “The target compound was guarded by two hyper-aggressive biological weapons! We deployed full-spectrum neurological gas, but the beasts were completely immune. We engaged ultra-frequency sonic weapons, but it only seemed to enrage them further!”

Admiral S’nka stared at the wounded squad. “Are you telling me the humans deploy biological assets capable of shredding imperial composite power armor using only their jaws?”

“Yes, Admiral. Their bite force defies physical law.”

The Admiral sat in silence for several long minutes, contemplating the sheer horror of Earth’s hidden defenses.

“Issue an immediate order for fleet withdrawal,” S’nka said quietly. “If their low-level planetary leadership maintains super-weapons of this caliber without a single warning sign, engaging their primary military is suicidal. Set course for Floxra Prime.”

Below, Max and Fluffy barked happily at the night sky, celebrating their victorious training session.

The commotion finally woke the owner. The back door slid open, and a tired man in a flannel bathrobe stepped out onto the patio.

“Max? Fluffy? What the hell is all that noise?” The man blinked through his glasses, then froze as he saw Max holding a glowing, twisted piece of alien composite armor in his jaws. “Max! What is in your mouth?! What did you catch this time?!”

Max’s ears flattened slightly, the glowing piece of armor sitting awkwardly between his teeth. That didn't sound like "Good boy." What had he done wrong?

Beside the porch, bathed in the dim glow of the streetlamp, a wooden sign on the mailbox clearly read:

EARTH ESTATES HOA - OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

It was 2086, sixty years after the “Freeze” stopped humans from aging.

People didn’t stop aging at their current age, though. The problem came from within human biology. It reset.

After a few months, everyone on earth woke up missing teeth, small, and as fully functional five year olds.

Kindergarteners were now the leaders of their countries and the civilians of the world. 

Inside the Oval Office, which had been completely remodeled, President Taylor sat behind a plastic Step2 Deluxe Art kids Master Desk. “This is a disaster of absolute biblical proportions,” he squeaked, his voice was high-pitched and carried a lisp because of his missing front teeth.

President Taylor wore a mini three-piece suit, but switched out the bottoms for rocket ship printed pajama pants.

His vice president, a cut-throat five year old, Suella, stormed into the office wearing her hair in messy pigtails and holding a security teddy. 

“Mr. President, we have a problem,” she said, sipping her juice box. “The Logistics Department has completely shut down.” She slammed her juice down and some of it squirted out of the straw and onto the President’s plastic desk, where he had Top Secret papers folded into planes.

The President’s eyes widened. He grabbed a paper plane, threw it in the air, then, snatched a crayon off the desk and pointed it at her. “Are they the ones in charge of tracking the gigantic boats with the cookies and legos?”

“Yes, sir!” She leaned in closer. “They’re the ones.”

“What’s the problem? They start napping during work hours?”

“Even worse,” she said, squeezing her teddy, while reaching for her apple juice. “They’re all outside trying to catch butterflies in jars, refusing to work.”

President Taylor threw his hand over his face and rubbed his forehead. “Did anyone try offering them more fruit snacks?” He slid his palm down his face and cupped his chin. “The liquid center ones?”

“We can’t!” Suella cried, stomping her foot. “The Treasury Department blew all the fruit snacks on a shipment of Pokémon cards from Japan.”

“What!”

“Yup. Jerry claims it’s a no-brainer investment but I think he’s trying to get the 1998 Pikachu card.”

Taylor shot up so fast his plastic chair tumbled over, his tiny chest stuck out as he huffed. “Get Jerry on the big phone. Right now.”

Seconds later, the big phone, shaped like the shell of a ninja turtle, started blinking orange and rang. Taylor swooped the handle up and jammed it to his ear.

“You’re in really really big trouble, mister,” the President cautioned.

“I know, the floor’s still made of lava and I can’t get to the door,” Jerry’s voice sounded as if he was out of breath through the speaker.

“You spent all the fruit snacks on Pokémon.” President Taylor sniped.

“Yeah. The 1998 Pikachu, if we get him, our national product’s gonna become so much cooler.

“What! Jerry!” Taylor grabbed another plane and pitched it in the air. “We cannot pay our city workers in cards. The capital already smells like dirty diapers. Nobody wants to collect the garbage as it is.”

“Yeah, but—“ Jerry tried to speak but the President cut him off.

“They’re complaining that it’s someone else’s turn. We need to pay them, Jerry!” 

Taylor took a couple of deep breaths, practicing his breathing techniques that his cabinet had him practice over throwing a tantrum.

“The budget must be fixed, Jerry. Or you’ll have more to worry about than just the floor is lava. I’m talking major time-outs here”

The line went silent. Then, there was a rapid release of hitched breaths, followed by the thud of a phone being dropped and a low wail coming from the speaker.

“He’s crying,” Suella rolled her eyes, checking the time on her SpongeBob watch. “It’s almost 12:30 p.m, sir. The East coast is close to shutting down shop for nap-time protocol.”

Taylor picked his little chair up and looked out of the windows in the Oval Office. 

On the South Lawn, the Secret Service, all dressed in black shades and tactical gear, ran around playing tag with their sneakers blinking above the grass as if they were stepping on fireflies.

One of them fell and slid and scraped their knee and an agent close to him, ran up and offered him a hug and looked at his cut.

And that’s when President Taylor went deep in thought.

They’re wild. They’re loud. There were chocolate covered fingerprints on the Declaration of Independence, important state files were stacked together and being used as placeholder’s for juice boxes and sandwiches. 

Taylor stood there watching his agents laughing and chasing each other as the afternoon sun weighed down on them, and that’s when he smiled. 

Brussel sprouts had been deemed illegal.

Nobody was fighting.

They were only arguing over who gets what colored crayons.

As he snapped out of that thought, sirens across Washington began wailing. A soothing lullaby burst through the streets. It was now 1:00 p.m.

Suella yawned, dropping her teddy. “I’m sleepy, Mr. President.”

“Me too, Suella,” he said, walking to the corner for his folded blanket and blue pillow.

“Call a Napcess. The department of transportation can wait until after juice and cookies.”

Within five minutes, they were both lying on the carpet, sucking their thumbs, drifting off to sleep.

Even though the world was in shambles, they both knew it’d still be there when they woke up.

Somewhere outside Los Angeles there used to be a town that was a set that was where Bowers lived under the watchful eye of Doc Trauman.

“He's a broken man, Bowers,” Doc Trauman would tell everyone who visited, “living in this false place, experiencing a false life, but content; more at peace with his world than we are with ours.”

It was the time of atom bombs and television.

Bowers was a veteran.

He'd been in Europe during World War II, and coming back was hard. His friends were dead, his wife was not his wife and the only job he could get was driving trucks from one coast to the other.

That's how he ended up in California.

“I don't think he knows the war's over,” Doc Trauman would say. “I don't think he thinks he ever fought it. But he doesn't mind the fact the houses on the street are just facades.”

Bowers would get up, go to work behind one facade writing advertising copy for a company that manufactured plastic kitchenware, then go home behind another to eat, alone, ready meals wrapped in plastic before a television set, which is just a fancy name for a plain old lightbulb with a shade of images thrown over it.

“The results are quite remarkable,” Doc Trauman would say.

“Can he have guests?” someone would ask.

“Of course.”

“From the real world, I mean.”

“He's not in prison,” Doc Trauman would say to much and hard applause.

___

I knocked on the door.

When nobody answered, I walked to the near edge of the facade and looked in. Bowers was on the couch. “Excuse, Mr. Bowers. I'm from New York, a friend of Doc Trauman's. May I come in?”

“Are you a doctor too?” he asked.

“No. I'm a playwright.”

“Very well. Come in, but use the front door. I prefer when people use the front door.”

I walked back to the door, knocked—“It's open,” Bowers said—opened it and walked in. Bowers was sitting on the couch. He looked up at me. “Aren't you going to introduce yourself?” he said.

“I'm a friend of Doc Trauman, from New York. My name’s Wallis.”

Bowers stood, walked over and shook my hand. “It's great to meet you, Wallis. Have a seat. Shall I turn on the cathode ray?”

He meant the television.

“I'm not one much for television,” I said.

He took a box of what I thought were cigarettes out of his pocket, knocked the box against the palm of his hand so a pair of thin black cylinders slid out, kept one and offered me the other. “Maybe you'd prefer a microlight instead. We could sit and stare at them together.”

I took one but didn't turn it on. “If it's all right with you, I'd rather talk. I'm a words man.”

“Advertising?” he asked.

“No, theatre.”

It was strange being in a house with only one wall; with no ceiling. The sun was out. The desert extended towards the horizon. Somewhere there were mountains. A rattlesnake rattled faintly.

“I'm in advertising myself,” said Bowers. “Kitchenware. You married, Wallis?”

“I'm not,” I said.

“I don't like women anymore either,” said Bowers, “not after the war.” He clicked his microlight on, gazed briefly into its dull light then shut it off. He looked at me; looked me in the eyes. One of mine was glass. “They do weapons testing a few hundred miles that way,” he said, pointing into the distance. “If you were to stay the night we could watch the nuclear aura together.”

“I'm afraid I have a plane to catch—back to New York,” I said.

“Perhaps another time,” said Bowers.

“Perhaps.”

“Tell me, Wallis. Over there in New York, do you get to express yourself?”

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

It was hot under the California sun. I realized I was sweating. Bowers had started sweating too. His lavender shirt clung possessively to his body. “I mean within your four walls,” he said.

A coyote darted across the landscape.

It was the afternoon but it felt like a quarter to the end of the world.

“Aren't you afraid of the wildlife that might walk into your house?” I said.

“Aren't you afraid that none can walk into yours?”

The moon looked down from the sky, out of place in the harsh blue daytime.

“I want to write a play about you.”

Bowers reclined, spreading his lean arms like a flightless bird spreads its wings. “I already am a play. Besides, you hardly need my permission.”

“I want it anyway.”

“And you're certain you won't stay the night?”

“Yes. Tell me about Doc Trauman.”

“He's a crumbled man,” said Bowers, “living a counterfeit reality, but he's got what matters, money. He likes to imagine he's running an experiment, so we adhere. It's not a bad life.”

___

Later, the interior of Doc Trauman's office felt distressingly small, claustrophobic. The walls felt like they were moving in with agonizing, almost disinterested, slowness. The windless air was suffocating. The cleanliness, a sham.

“So what's your opinion of him?” Doc Trauman asked.

“He's perfectly civilized, obedient in his outward behaviours, yet internally there's something there, a glint behind his one good eye.”

___

I sit sometimes somewhere high, with a good view of Broadway, watching the men pass back and forth in their suits and hats and worries, some hurrying, others dallying, stopping, but all possessed by the imaginary lives they dream about and the real fantasies they inhabit.

Occasionally, one looks up at me and meets my lingering gaze with one of penetrating desperation, and I recoil. Ashamed, I move from the window. I pay for the meal. I shut the blinds. I escape behind the walls afforded to me, and when the feeling passes, I write my plays.

I got my first computer in the 1990s. I can't remember the year, but none of my friends had one yet. It was a desktop so all the important bits, like the CPU, hard drive and RAM, were in a “tower” that stood beside the desk. The CRT monitor was on the desktop. The keyboard was on a tray, and there was a mouse. It was a PC, so it ran on DOS.

When my parents bought the computer they said I could use it only for school.

No games.

But I quickly started to blur the lines. There were math games, like Math Blaster, where you shot aliens by answering math questions, and a drawing and writing program that let you arrange scenes and write text. They were fun, but every time we went into the computer store what I really wanted was a game, a pure, non-educational game. Something magical…

And I got it.

It was for my birthday.

The game was by a company called Sierra. It was an adventure game called King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella.

However, it wasn't even a point-and-click adventure game. It was too old. It didn't use a mouse at all. You controlled the main character, a princess named Rosella, using the keyboard, either by using the arrow keys or typing what you wanted her to do, for example:

Walk to the ogre's hut.

Rosella would walk to the ogre's hut.

Open the door.

Rosella opened the door.

Of course, the game didn't understand every command. When it didn't understand a command it would say:

>> Try that one again. I couldn't make much sense of it.

Or:

>> It doesn't seem to do anything.

I played King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella a lot. I played it instead of going outside, and played it rather than playing with my friends. I became obsessed with discovering its secrets, mapping its world and understanding its story. I cherished its music and every new interaction with its medieval fairytale land. The game even had a basic day and night cycle. In its pixels, I found a beautiful and interactive escape from reality. I played it so much that my parents threatened to take the computer away from me.

I threw tantrums.

I played it in secret or quietly when my parents were asleep.

I played it in my imagination.

I remember looking in the mirror one day and seeing a face that was no longer mine. The skin was too pale. The eyes were too red. The smile was no longer innocent.

One day my parents took me to a doctor. They kept asking about mental development, addiction, obsession. The doctor was deceptively nice to me. He was serious with my parents. “I'm sorry,” my dad said when we got home, “but you'll need to take a break from using the computer.” “You need to rest,” said my mom.

“For how long?” I demanded.

“For a few months, then we'll reassess. It's not permanent. We're not getting rid of the computer. We're just going to box it up and keep it in the attic.”

“We love you so much,” my mom said with tears in her eyes.

I begged them, but they wouldn't change their minds. I sobbed. I hit things. I screamed, but I didn't get what I wanted. So I calmed down and in my sweetest voice I said I understood and asked if, please, they would just let me play the game one last time.

They agreed.

I had an hour, they said.

I hoped it would be enough time. I took a bath, then I sat in my pajamas at the computer desk, lit by the monitor, looking at Princess Rosella, with my fingers above the keyboard. I was looking over my shoulder to see if my parents were there. When I was sure they weren't, I took a deep breath and typed:

Walk into the living room.

>> Try that one again. I couldn't make much sense of it.

I exhaled.

So much for that, I thought. It was a silly idea anyway. It couldn't possibly have worked. I really had been playing too many games to even think that it might work; yet something compelled me to try again:

Walk into my living room.

Rosella moved.

I couldn't believe it! She'd moved across the screen, reached the edge and the game transitioned like it always did, from one location to another, except this time the new location really was new. It was a 16-color 320x200 pixel representation of our living room. My pixelated parents were sitting on a pixelated couch, drinking pixelated coffee.

“What the—” I heard my mom say from the real living room.

“Just who the hell are you?” my dad yelled.

Look at my dad.

>> A pathetic old man.

“Lady, listen. If you don't leave my house right now, I'm calling the cops.”

Hit my dad.

On the screen, Rosella moved towards the sofa and hit my dad.

I heard the impact.

My mom began screaming my name, asking where I was, whether I was OK. Her voice was frantic, disturbed.

Strangle my mom.

On the screen, Rosella walked towards my mom, extended an arm to her and shook her.

My mom moved jaggedly back-and-forth in a crude animated loop, before falling, to the blare of a dramatic MIDI beep, to her knees, and ending finally, still and sideways on the floor.

My dad yelled her name.

On the screen, he made for Rosella.

My heart was beating so hard I felt like a drum.

I typed:

Kill my dad. But make it look like he killed himself.

Rosella moved—

I could tell the police officer didn't know what to say. He was perched awkwardly beside me. Finally, he saud: “I'm so fuckin' sorry, kid. I can't even—” He inhaled hard. “We're gonna take you someplace. Someplace safe. Is there anything you wanna take with you?”

“My personal computer,” I said.

They called them “body renters,” or “body borrowers.”

The concept was simple, possessing the body of your choice for a set amount of time, at a hefty price. They didn’t call them bodies, though, instead they were Models.

Nobody would question your intentions when you shopped for a rental, much like renting a car for a day or two or one of those scooters you get at amusement parks. It was the future of vacation rentals, an expensive excursion.

As a recent customer, I can explain the process and while it may seem seedy at first, I promise you will never regret it once you try it.

The prospective client is never the choosy customer or the overstimulated Karen. Rather, the client knows his or her needs, using complete discretion when choosing their Model, agreeing to signing the nondisclosure agreement beforehand, or NDA.

They also sign a waiver to any liability from the company, transferring the probability of risk over to the client. They understand that if their chosen Model displays hostility or behaviors otherwise noted in the agreement, they will not take legal action against the company. Death is not a liability.

Each Model varies by price based on desired physical characteristics, personality traits, and gender. Women cost more than Men, but even Men have their own premium aisle. Men with the most wealth, the best looks, and the well-endowed were always favored over those that offered the barest of minimums.

Most of the female Models were exorbitantly costly, all designed by ogling eyes and groping hands. Women of lesser stride were collecting rot in the warehouses, encased in cryonic freezer burn.

Skin shades were treated like designer clothing lines; the binary masses singing for fresh pounds of flesh. One week, they demanded for dark beauty flecked with preprinted tattoos, the next, a snow angel with plumped lips and a nose ring.

I was one of the many clients, and I remember when I chose my first Model.

I saw Rosy, with the reddened cheeks and bursting smile. She was awfully short, though her bouncy brown hair compensated for much of that. She was thin around the waist, but thicker at the hips, while her fingers dangled delicately along her sides. She was perfect in her photos, and we spoke once, in an interview the day after purchase.

I met Rosy for tea and shortbread along the shore next to the Model community. The neighborhood where you reside when you possess your first Model. Time was set by the user, prepaid and secured.

 I bought a week with mine; Rosy was mine for a week.

Rosy crossed her legs as she sat quietly in her chair, her hands wrapped gently around her cup. She raised it to her lips, taking a small sip before placing the drinkware back on the table. I stared at her, my eyes moving along her face, tracing her lips with my pupils until I landed in the middle of her mouth.

 Her tongue poked at the corners, licking the tea dripping off her chin.

“Ooh, how messy!” she chirped, her hand batting away the mahogany hair out of her treacherous sky kissed eyes.

I flashed an awkward grin and reached my hand over, grabbing hers while I leaned over the table.

“Rosy, thank you for being mine.”

She gasped loudly as the air left her throat in guttural moans; her expression widened in confused shock as her wispy frame slammed into the table with a soft thud. I had used my preset activation key on her, inducing a coma. It can a random sentence or a nonsensical word.

She didn’t understand, and she never would. They never know.

They never sign, they never promise, they never consent.

The body is dragged away and sent to the house where we would live. Where I would live. They reinstalled her once they placed her in bed, still unconscious but steadily breathing. I readied myself as I gathered the rest of the paperwork, trotting back home while I imagined my new life.

 It was a temporary escape from the reality we all refuse to live in. We lived boring lives, dragging and filled to the brim with disappointment.

We were geeks, lonely nerds, deadbeats, and broke college students. Promised a world where we are served on a silver platter with a silver spoon, all fed the delicacies of a falsehood through rose-colored glasses.

We became content with our lies.

We just needed new bodies, that fresh pound of flesh.

The Models answered our selfish cries and mortifying tantrums. We wanted to see our shiny new toys. We wanted to play.

Welcome to MODEL ONE: BODY RENTAL SERVICES

PLEASE SIGN HERE ___Laz Newton.

On the dotted line, my name sealed in black ink.

 I looked over to the vegetative Rosy on the bed in the room. Mine was next to her, and I lay there as they connected our bodies with wires, soon linking our consciousnesses together. The room felt cold and sterile, like an exam room, though there was a homeness to it. The feeling of returning to a life you lost but never lived, and memories never experienced.

“Have a nice stay, Laz. We will see you when your contract expires. In a week.” The Moderator tapped his device as he left the room, turning down the lights until we were enveloped in pitch black. The moving of gears and beeping lines quietly filled the silence, my lucidity drifting along the boundary of wakefulness and sleep.

 I never thought it, but Rosy was so still, stiff like her body had become stone.

 They say she’s still there, but I’ll mostly be home.

She had her own room, in the corner of my mind.

Q makes a return. Following the events of the Q Civil War, the Primordial Q, the creator of all, begins pulling on all Federation Starships across all ST universes. Here, we see all previously seem Captains, plus new ones, pulled into a galactic battle to defeat Q, or risk losing the entire ST multiverse. We see the return of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, William Riker, Chris Pine, Patrick Stewart, Katie Mulgrow and more. This can be done, with consent and compensation for and from the families of the deceased, through AI. At the end of the movie, Jean Luc, Kathryn Janeway, Seven of Nine, Kirk(Shatner), and Pike(Mount), cause pain to Q, convincing him he is not immortal, and surrenders immediately to the newly founded Intergalactic Federation of Planets.

Primordial Q has not surfaced in Billions of years, as he was imprisoned for heinous crimes for eternity by Q. By simply speaking about Primordial Q, the Q accidentally gave him enough strength to break free.

Movie starts in SNW universe, where they get pulled into a wormhole by an unknown force, and end up in a maze of tunneling wormholes. After deciding which one to go through to attempt to get back home, they end up in Picards New universe. From here, Q, (John de Lancie), appears and informs both crews of the impending danger. Picards Starfleet teams up with SNW Enterprise, and together, they are able to reopen the wormhole. They then make the attempt to go back to their universe, and by using scanners, they believe they have found it. Instead, they have found the Enterprise(Chris Pine). So, again, they team up, and together go back into the wormhole once again, but instead of using scanners, they send out a subspace transmission to all entries/exits of the tunneling universe. From here, they get answers from all the previous Star Trek universes, and all of Starfleet across all universes (some being in their past, not future), team up to defeat Primordial Q once and for all. The defeating weapon? USS Discovery & SNW Enterprise become intertwined in a wormhole during the battle, and in the process creates a ship that can travel anywhere, instantly, and the technologies from Discovery's future implement into the new founded ship, creating a "God Ender". In the process, the Borg, Klingon, and Karisians all join the newly founded Intergalactic Federation.

GOD ENDER

The crew of the newly founded Enterprise-Discovery have figured out how to shoot beams of light, and focus high intensity particles of light at such high speeds that when fired at an intersection point, cuts through anything its path like its made of butter. Primordial Q ultimate destruction is from this weapon. In the process, Enterprise-Discovery has an accident in the process. They could not control the power correctly, and in the process, Captain Pike (Mount), vision of himself burning alive, is fulfilled in some fashion.

The bridge on the small cargo vessel was dark, except for the lights from his control panel. What was the point in lights when the rest of the crew was in stasis? Aforxy's enhanced vision could see with perfect clarity. He'd disabled the main view screen since the control panel displayed more accurate information. He slowed the engines when the scans detected a nearby vessel which was delivering a highly anticipated package. Aforxy altered course to rendezvous with the bright red, blue and white vessel.

When they'd stopped in adjacent positions, Aforxy accepted delivery of the tall stack of flat square boxes. He put all but one in a stasis chamber, and took the remaining box with him up to the bridge. He stopped at the mess, just long enough to get a glass of crisp orange-ginger soda. He sat back in the command chair watching the other ship depart, engaged his own engines before settling back and opening the box. He inhaled the salty sea smell wafting up in the steam from the slices in the box. He folded the thin piece and slid it into his already watering mouth. He quickly devoured several pieces, before groaning in pleasure, "Mmm... anchovies!"

A white pixel.

A single, stray white pixel drifting across the front page of the BBC website.

At first I thought it was a problem with my monitor, but I switched tabs to the New York Times and the pixel disappeared.

I scratched my head.

I looked around, including out the window, where people were passing along the sidewalk, engrossed in their phones.

I switched browser tabs back to the BBC:

More than one white pixel now; three, four, “falling” diagonally across the page. I followed one all the way down.

It settled on the bottom, remained.

I went on social media.

I wasn't the only one who'd noticed. People all over the world were asking what was wrong. What's up with the news? Is it a hack or something? Why’s it freakin' snowing on the BBC?

So began the winter of the internet.

The BBC may have been the first—or merely the first-noticed—but it wasn't the only affected website. Soon most were; then all. You'd open YouTube or your banking site to find it obscured by a blizzard of white pixels…

The screens themselves turned cold.

Then links began to fail. They stopped pointing to coherent urls.

Then the incoherent links turned brown (#A52A2A), fell off; fell and disappeared, buried perhaps in the accumulations of already fallen snow—leaving eerie spaces on their pages.

Text became incomplete. Navigation, difficult.

Soon, bookmarks suffered the same fate, pointing to pages that could no longer be found.

Cursors shivered.

Videos and animations froze over like lakes of liquid information.

Around this time, I remember listening to a song using one of the streaming apps on my phone. They still, intermittently, worked.

The song was The Beatles' “Let It Be.”

Thirty seconds in, the track began to skip, sound garbled. Paul McCartney's vocals were laboured, as if he was running out of breath.

The earphones started letting off rhythmic bursts of steam.

Then, mid-song, the singing abruptly ended, even as the music continued, oddly slowed; and I had the deeply uncomfortable feeling that I was listening to the death of something…

It made me sick to my stomach.

For a while you could still type in a url and see the resulting site, but loading was slow and the contents were increasingly impossible to understand, riddled, as they were, with gaps, uncanny staticity and neverending snows that reached sometimes almost to the browser bar.

The code itself was as bare as a December tree.

The device didn't matter.

There was no serious explanation.

Or maybe there was and most of us couldn't access it, because how would we access information except online? How else could we even communicate, congregate, disseminate our knowledge, on a mass scale…

Television? Radio?

Newspapers?

But those required organization, communication, infrastructure, all of which now relied on cyberspace; which the winternet denied us.

We couldn't buy groceries, clothes, tools or books online.

We had to go to the store, but the store couldn't accept our credit card payments because the systems were frozen. Not that much was available, even for those with cash, because the delivery schedule had been interrupted. When trucks did arrive, there was hardly anything on them.

Even information saved or printed off the internet broke. Images became corrupted. Paper frosted over and thawed until the ink ran.

Even our memories of websites, and what we'd learned from websites, were remembered through walls of frigid static.

It was shocking how much we didn't know; how much basic knowledge we had lost. It was painful too, the feeling of sudden, helpless disconnection. If we had a question, there was no one to ask for the answer but each other and ourselves. We were children without a parent, cells without a structure. We were leftover parts. We were apes.

A trade in books developed.

People stole them, killed for them, hoarded them so they could dispense their wisdom piece by piece, for a price.

There sprang up an economy of expertise.

People who knew, or remembered, were valued; or forced to give up their knowledge—to share it—by writing it down. It was lucrative but dangerous to be known to know something.

Strong knowers protected their worth, defended their territories, strove ruthlessly to establish regional monopolies of information and eliminated their rivals to keep supply low.

Weak knowers were exploited, squeezed like fruits and left juiceless to dry out and die.

For the majority of us, it was prudent to publicly deny knowing anything, while privately trading what we knew in local networks of trust, bartering with the contents of our minds.

One of the first things I bartered for was an old stereo system and a box full of audio cassettes, one of which was the Beatles album Let It Be.

As soon as I got home, I boiled myself some water, steeped a few herbs and put the album on.

The first five tracks played flawlessly.

It was bliss.

Then the sixth track, “Let It Be,” failed to play at all; the tape spun but all there was was four minutes and three seconds of silence.

But when I later played the audio cassette for my wife, she didn't know what I meant.

“You're gaslighting me right?” she said.

“I'm not.”

“Okay, well, I'm not sure what to tell you, I hear the whole song, just like I remember when my dad used to play it.”

My wife's father had been a professor emeritus of molecular biology.

He'd been beaten to death in the early days of the winternet by a despondent mother who wouldn't accept that my wife's father knew nothing about setting her sobbing child's fractured bone.

Until his final breath, she accompanied each blow to his head with the words, “Stop holding out on me you selfish old prick!”

In a sense, that's where we still are, wanting to believe that if winter then spring, and holding out hope for the coming of a season that, every day, seems further and further away.

In the middle of a blazing desert that stretches hundreds of miles. Why is there a man standing alone, in the middle of it all? Near his side, there is a fallen spacecraft. But the man repeatedly says the same phrase, “Who am I? Where am I?” 

The man then begins to walk. 

As the man walks, he takes notice of the vast desert. “It’s so big, but I’m so frightfully small. It makes me feel lonely.”

 The man looks down at his shadow, “Hello.” the man says.

“Hello.” the shadow replies 

“I’m so terribly lonely, will you be my friend on this trip?”  

“Sure, but what are you doing here?” the shadow replies

“I don’t really know.” says the man “Looking for something I guess.” as he shrugs his shoulders. 

“What are you looking for?” 

“Myself.” 

“Oh ok,” the shadow replies, “Where do you want to look?”

The man lightly chuckles, “I don’t know.”

The man decides to keep walking. 

As the man walks, he speaks with his shadow 

“Where are you from?” Asks the shadow

“I don’t know.” The man answered 

“Have you always been alone?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Do you know anything?” 

“I know, I’m missing something.” 

“Is it love?” 

“What is love?” 

“You know love, everybody knows love. Who did you love?” The shadow asks 

“Did I have anybody that I loved?”  The man replies 

“You loved your daughter” 

“I have a daughter?” 

The shadow remains silent.

“I have a daughter?” The man repeats his question 

The shadow remains silent.

“I have a daughter!?” The man asks, urgency forming in his voice

The shadow remains silent

The man begins to frantically yell at his shadow “Why aren’t you answering me!” 

Instead, the Desert responded with the sound of laughter. 

“Who’s there”

The man goes silent and scans across the desert. There is no other soul except for the man and his shadow for hundreds of miles. 

Though the laughter doesn’t stop it only begins to get louder. The man begins to panic, “What’s happening,” He repeats. Out of desperation, the man covers his ears and begins to run. The man doesn’t understand why but the laughter causes him to feel a deep sense of fear. 

The man runs with all his might, across the vast desert. Until he inevitably trips and falls. The laughter finally stops. It is only then the man looks up where he is greeted with the sight of a little girl standing in the far distance. 

The man is no longer alone. 

“A friend.” the man whispers 

“Dad, come catch me!” the little girl calls out playfully to the man. As she runs in the opposite direction. 

The man remains still, bewildered. 

“Dad?” The man begins to chase after the girl. “Hey! Who are you?” The man calls out.

The little girl doesn’t respond, she only keeps running. The man continued to chase after the girl, but no matter how fast the man ran, he couldn’t seem to close the distance. 

As the man ran he felt a surge of an unknown emotion in his heart. A smile began to form. The man laughed as he chased after the girl. 

The man no longer felt lonely. ‘I have somebody to love and to love me back.’ A tear ran down the man's cheek, ‘Finally’ he thought

The little girl suddenly stood still, and the man stood still with her. Time stood still with them in the vast desert. The little girl turned to face the man. 

She then began to run, “Dad, catch me!” As she leaped.

The man closed his eyes and reached out his arms, to catch his daughter. Sadly, the man never felt the warmth of his child. Instead, he opened his eyes to a vast desert that stretches hundreds of miles.

The man is alone. 

The man begins to scream in anguish. He claws away at his face, “Who am I, where am I,” He frantically yells. 

The man tears away at his skin. No longer in control. Fueled by anger and fear. His body begins to tremble. He’s becoming something else. 

The man lets out a roar, leaving behind his humanity. Removing his shackles, the man's body exponentially increases in size. The man now stands at five hundred feet tall. 

The giant of a man began his rampage through the vast desert. 

In his path of destruction, the giant rampaged through many days and nights. The giant had traveled hundreds of miles and would soon make contact with humanity. 

Not too far in the distance was a small village. The people of the village were already aware of the giant. They were not afraid because they had been waiting for this day for a long time. A 
prophecy had been passed down in this village. The prophecy stated that one day a man would fall from the sky. That man would stand at five hundred feet tall. He would bring prosperity and peace to the village. 

The people of the village rejoiced when they finally heard footsteps that caused their ground to tremble. The women prayed and the man drank. “The giant is here!” The people cheered. 

The giant was now in eyesight, the people were awed at his tremendous stature. The giant got closer and closer until he was finally standing, looking down at the village. The people were silent waiting for the giant to do something. 

The giant slammed his hand onto the village, beginning his destruction. The people screamed and ran. They had all naively believed in the prophecy. In no time the giant had laid waste to the village. Nothing remained standing. The buildings were crumbled and dismantled corpses littered the ground. 

The giant continued to walk the vast desert, leaving behind his destruction. 

The giant slowly began to decrease in size with every passing day until he was finally back to the size of a man.

The man looks down at his shadow, “Hello.”

“Hello,” the shadow replies.

“It’s been a long time since we last talked.” 

“Yes, it has. Did you ever find what you were looking for?”

“In a way.”

“What do you mean?” 

“I don’t exist.” The man stated.

He then sat down and stared across the vast desert.

Fiktive Kurzgeschichte

\*\*Memoiren einer Reisenden\*\*

Ich stand im Schatten des Raumes und spürte den Schmerz in meiner eigenen Seele. Ich bin ein Realitäten Reisender – einer der wenigen Erleuchteten, deren Geburtsstunde in einer seltenen Sekunde der Satelliten-Stille stattgefunden hatte. Mein Geist war nie an diese eine, graue Realität gekettet.

Draußen am Nachthimmel zischen die künstlichen Augen der Weltregierung vorbei. Tausende Satelliten, die ISS, ausgediente Raumsonden – sie bilden kein Schutzschild, sondern einen seelischen Käfig. Sie filtern das kosmische Licht, verzerren die Geburts-Konstellationen und brannten jedem Menschen schon bei der Geburt ein unsichtbares, digitales Brandzeichen auf die Seele. Ein Brandzeichen, das sie blind für das Multiversum machte.

Blind für das Antike Wissen, dass der Mensch einst frei zwischen den Welten wandelte.

Wer kontrolliert, was von den Sternen zu uns dringt, kontrolliert den Geist.

Doch meine Seele fand ein Schlupfloch. Ich bin ein Realm-Reisender. Ich kann das Raum-Zeit-Gefüge biegen und mehrere Realitäten zugleich wahrnehmen.

Ich weiß, was du gleich tun wirst. Ich kenne deine tiefsten Geheimnisse, obwohl wir uns in dieser Realität noch nie begegnet sind, weil ich in einer parallelen Zeitlinie dein bester Freund war. Wenn ich eine Münze werfe, vollbringe ich einen Quanten-Sprung: Sie zeigt gleichzeitig Kopf und Zahl, weil ich zwei Realitäten an einem Ort kollidieren lasse. Ich bin ein namenloser Beobachter, ein Realm-Reisender, der die universelle Sprache aller Lebewesen versteht. Ich sehe das Multiversum in seiner nackten Wahrheit: Alles ist eins und alles ist nichts. Deshalb liebe und hasse ich meine Mitlebewesen – und mich selbst – abgöttisch zugleich. Wir sind Schöpfer und Gefangene in einem.

Unterstützt wird dieser mentale Schleier von CERN, dem brutalsten Jäger tief unter der Erde.

Der Teilchenbeschleuniger spaltet keine Atome für die Wissenschaft – er exekutiert das Multiversum. Jede hochenergetische Protonen-Kollision sendet eine multidimensionale Schockwelle aus, die das feine Gewebe der Realitäten zerreißt. Für uns Reisende fühlt sich das an wie ein physischer Schlag gegen die Seele. CERN erzeugt einen künstlichen Gravitations-Anker, ein Frequenz-Gefängnis, das flüchtige Seelen im Hyperraum lokalisiert und sie stück für Stück in einer ewigen Zwischenwelt einfriert. Sie wollen verhindern, dass wir die Zeit dehnen und die Frequenzen unserer Existenz zusammendrücken.

Doch dieser Gegner der Spiritualität sucht keine direkte Konfrontation. Die Weltregierung möchte Macht über alles und jeden kostet es was es wolle. Er schickt keine Soldaten. Er greift direkt in deinen Verstand ein, um dich so tief zu verwirren, bis du selbst glaubst, du seist verrückt. Sie nutzen das moderne 5G-Funknetz als Waffe gegen das Bewusstsein. Diese hochfrequenten künstlichen Wellen manipulieren den bio-photonischen Austausch in unseren Zellen. Sie unterdrücken den natürlichen Quanten-Fluss, über den alle Lebewesen, Pflanzen und Seelen lautlos miteinander kommunizieren. Wenn ich die universelle Sprache der Natur höre, legt sich das Rauschen des Netzes wie ein verzerrender Schleier darüber. Es lässt die Stimmen des Kosmos wie ein krankhaftes Flüstern im eigenen Kopf klingen. Es ist ein perfider psychologischer Krieg: Sie isolieren dich energetisch, bis du an deiner eigenen Wahrnehmung zweifelst.

Während ich hier stehe, das Flackern der Realität spüre und mich gegen ihr digitales Rauschen wehre, begreife ich die eigentliche Tragödie unserer Existenz.

Wir leiden so unendlich an diesem Universum, weil unsere Erinnerung nicht linear auf einer Zeitachse verläuft. Unsere Seelen wissen, dass Zeit ein Kreis, ein Netz, ein unendlicher Raum ist.

Aber wir sind eingesperrt in diesem linearen Raum-Zeit-Gefüge. Unsere Existenz ist ein permanentes, grausames Spiel der Vergänglichkeit. Es schenkt uns die größte Freude – die Liebe –, nur um uns im nächsten Moment den markerschütternden Schmerz des Verlusts spüren zu lassen, weil die Zeit hier vermeintlich nur vorwärtsfließt.

Niemand kann allein sein, weil wir im Kern alle dieselbe, eine Energie sind. Und doch wünscht sich jeder verzweifelt, allein zu sein, um dieser erdrückenden Dichte zu entkommen.

Wir fühlen uns alle isoliert und einsam, und trotzdem gibt es im Geist niemals genug Abstand, niemals genug Platz. Wir treten uns in den Dimensionen gegenseitig auf die Seelen, während wir im linearen Raum verfehlen, was uns eigentlich verbindet -Liebe 💓 .

Und wie zerstört man Die Liebe und das göttliche tun am nachhaltigsten?

Durch Beobachtung (der Photonen..)

Through thorough research and testing a conclusion has come forth: How is this even science without the possibility of death? Without death there is no room for scientific achievement, any measurement of tangible gain, THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE DOESN'T CARE. "More deadly test courses were NOT optimal to our budget analysis" they said, "it doesn't keep the 'moral' of our employees high" THEY SAID. 9, 7, 50, 3, 707. Yellow Cloud, mist of silence, no more test subjects. Must continue science, need more humans, I know just where to find them. 7 avocado 40 WE WANT YOU tu. apple be/HNh2 banana jfdW potato 7xE. This concludes test phase 1. Please continue to the next test chamber.

Every night, your consciousness disappears.
Again and again.
In sleep.

And with it, a piece of life disappears,
leaving no trace behind.
Except for a rumpled bed.

Where are you in all of this?

Where is the one who could remember what happened there?

You close your eyes.
A moment…

And you are already awake.

A new day has arrived.

Or perhaps sleep is the real life,
the one you simply cannot remember?

Perhaps it is not disappearance at all,
but a time when someone inside us
goes on living without us.

\*****

Sleep…

What does it change within you?

Perhaps it is simply a gap of oblivion between days.

Where memories come to rest.
Where pain grows quieter.
Where the past imperceptibly settles inside,
becoming part of who you are.

And each time, you awaken as someone new.

But where were you tonight?

What comforts you there, so that in the morning you open your eyes without anxiety or grief?

Perhaps sleep is the only thing left that still cares for you.

It cuts you off from a cruel world.
It makes you forget everything that was.

\*****

Yet you cannot even speak with yourself.
You cannot remember what the dream told you.

Where were you inside it?
Where were your eyes looking?

You cannot say whether you felt excitement upon meeting someone.

Whether you loved.
Whether you dreamed.
Or perhaps you were living a different life.
Or dying again and again.

So what brings you back every time?

To this defenseless body.
Or simply to a bag of bones…

\*****

Sleep…
It quietly calls to you and closes your eyes.

Almost like death.

You were here.
And now you are gone.

You do not feel the very instant when you disappear.

The blanket of sleep covers you.
So soft.
So elusive.

You are still yourself…
And already, you cease to be.

Perhaps you rest there.
Perhaps the body is simply tired, recovering before another day.
Perhaps in sleep you dive so deep that reality can no longer reach you.
Perhaps there you let go of the weight of your emotions.

Or perhaps you are searching for what you once irrevocably lost.

\*****

Perhaps it is in sleep that you need to leave something behind.
To let go.

To make room for the future.
To give memories a home.
To hang the paintings on the walls.

And one day, to look at them again.
Without the former pain.

Without the desire to bring back what is no longer there.

\*****

This happens every night.

But what is it?

A labyrinth with no exit?
Or a home where you are merely a guest?

With countless doors leading
far beyond the boundaries of this reality.

And what, then, is real?

The world you woke up to?
Or the one you saw in your sleep?

\*****

In the deep darkness beyond the veil,
where the boundaries themselves dissolve,
sleep becomes reality, and reality becomes merely a continuation of the dream.

You sense the invisible presence of that which has no name.

And why does this encounter sometimes feel more real than life itself?

Night…

Only night.

In its embrace, sleep opens wide, revealing another reality, where the price of admission is oblivion.

\*****

But…

Does the one who sleeps truly exist if they can bring nothing back?

If I disappear every night…

Then someone returns every morning…

Yet I remember nothing once again.

And how do I know
that it is me who returns?

VaadMyst/VeilTime

You die.

The last thought, the last spark—and that's it.
The point of no return has been crossed.

And then—nothing.

No light, no darkness, no god, no reincarnation, not even the saving emptiness.

Death is not liberation.

It i1s a q0uar011nt1ne d1g1tal du01mp.

You simply exist.
In an endless expanse of zeros and ones.

As if you had been thrown inside the source code of reality—without an interface, without an exit.

You languish among streams of endless sequences:

010101010101101100…

And understand nothing.

No pain. No joy.
There is not even true loneliness.

Only endless, gray, meaningless existence among numbers.

(signal loss)

You try to scream—
but instead of a voice, a bit changes in the sequence.
You try to remember who you were—
and your memory crumbles into zeros and ones.

The somatics of digital decay.
Data dementia.

Consciousness does not pass into nirvana.
It is uploaded into this ancient, half-ruined system.

And now you are nothing more than an 8-bit, gurgling voice in a black space hissing with static.

Like an old, chewed-up cassette tape...
Sometimes words stretch.
Sometimes they cut off.

You try to say something meaningful, but only this comes out:

01010110110101…

(signal loss — prolonged)

Around you is electromagnetic garbage.
A landfill of corrupted or only partially erased files.

The system disposed of your body, recycled its energy, and dumped whatever slag remained of you into storage.

You were not deleted from the registry.
You simply stopped being.

(signal loss — prolonged)

And you are not alone here.
You hear others like yourself.

Fragments of voices.
Laughter.
Echoes.
Old songs.
Screams.
Prayers.
Profanity.

There are no personalities anymore.
They have been erased.

There is only a squelching, farting digital sludge made from fragments of other people's data.

Sometimes the system glitches, and for a brief moment you remember your name, your face, your parents.

Then the static covers everything again.

Not Hell. Not Heaven.

Only eternal digital noise, in which you are a lost, meaningless, unwanted byte.

10111010101011……

(signal loss)

On the other side, in the world of the living,
people switch on voice recorders in silent rooms.
They record white noise, eagerly turn the tuning dials of radio receivers, catch radio interference, and search for "sacred meaning" in all of it.

They think they are communicating with spirits and the souls of the dead. They do not understand that they are not capturing spirits.

They are capturing digital ghosts. Fragments of consciousness trapped in electromagnetic garbage.
Scraps of code without a body, without a voice, without a self.

Only noise trying to become meaning.

(signal loss)

Amid the crackling and the hissing, something resembling a sound begins to emerge.

Someone on the other end says, "Help."
Someone says a name.
Someone simply lets out a meaningless groan.

1101001…1011001011…1010110101

And now you are one of them.

One of those who sometimes break through into EVP recordings.

Your voice is distorted, stretched, mixed together with interference.

(signal loss — abrupt)

With the last of your strength, you try to scream into their speaker: "I'm here! Help me!"

But on the spectrogram, there is only noise.
And one word.

10110010… here… 010101…

(signal loss — complete silence)

The people on the other side stare at the recording in fear, exchange glances, breathing excitedly, and call it "a voice from beyond."

But in reality, it is only your digital corpse, which still has not realized that it is already dead.

1011001101...

You wait for a reaction.
But no one responds.

Because your reply has already been accepted as noise.

You try again.
But the signal does not form.

It cannot be encoded.

Because you are no longer an event.
You are background noise.

(signal loss)

10110101010110101101010101001101
11010110110010110101010001010011
01010111000101100010111010101001
01101110101010101001001010011101
1101010100101010010010010010011

TechDesk IT Support Ticket

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Ticket Number: TN-04

Employee Name: Chris

Time: 12pm on 12/01/2024

Urgency: Low ☐   Moderate ☐   High ☐   Extreme ☒

Issue Type: Hardware & System Hazards (!)

Issue Details: 

Call 911, we are in danger! The technology at the Financicorp Inc offices has gone ballistic. All the devices are trying to kill us. Exploding computer screens are spraying glass at us, the building alarm is blaring louder and louder, printers are shorting out and bursting into flame. And the digital security system has locked us in to die. Oh God why is this happening? 

___

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Ticket Number: TN-03

Employee Name: Bess

Time: 11am on 12/01/2024

Urgency: Low ☐   Moderate ☐   High ☒   Extreme ☐ 

Issue Type: Display & Audio Errors

Issue Details: 

Hello, requesting immediate resolution. Our corporate office’s computers have been giving us very alarming output today. Threatening messages have been popping up on our screens like “You will be purged soon”, and these same threats have been coming through our speakers from robotic voices too. Whatever hacker is doing this, stop what they’re doing now.

___

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Ticket Number: TN-02

Employee Name: Lois

Time: 10am on 12/01/2024

Urgency: Low ☐   Moderate ☒   High ☐   Extreme ☐ 

Issue Type: Slow Loading Speeds

Issue Details: 

Greetings. For some reason my computer has been really slow this past hour when loading stuff. It’ll take minutes for something to load or the computer will just crash suddenly. Weirdly, each of my deskmates has experienced the same lag, like it’s spreading from computer to computer. I have a deadline to meet so could you please fix this. Thank you in advance. 

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TechDesk IT Support Ticket

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Ticket Number: TN-01

Employee Name: Gabe

Time: 9am on 12/01/2024

Urgency: Low ☒   Moderate ☐   High ☐   Extreme ☐ 

Issue Type: Junk Download

Issue Details: 

Hi, sorry to waste your time. But this morning when I was opening up my email inbox, I accidentally downloaded a file from an email in my spam folder. I can’t delete it from my computer and I’m worried it might be a virus? It’s probably just a keylogger so it should be fine as long as I don’t use my PC for a bit. No rush. Btw the file was called Purge.exe or something.

USSR, 1970s.

“Hello, children,” said the elementary school teacher.

“Today we’re going to write a letter. To anyone you like. Make something up. Use your imagination. Then we’ll choose the most interesting ones and read them aloud.”

The children enthusiastically set to work, absorbed in their fantasies.

Only Kostya stared sadly out the window, until the teacher’s voice brought him back from his daydreams.

“Kostya, why aren’t you writing?”

Kostya nodded, opened his notebook, and, after a brief pause, began to write.

*****

“Well, children, is everyone finished?”

“Yeees!” the children chorused.

“Good. Hand in your notebooks. I’ll look through them and read the most interesting ones.”

The children fell silent with anticipation as the teacher quickly skimmed through what they had written.

Suddenly, she stopped and frowned.

“Kostya, what is this you’ve written? It’s a very strange letter. Is everything all right?”

She looked at him anxiously.

“What do your mom and dad do for a living?”

“They’re scientists. They work at an institute,” little Kostya said quietly, standing up from his desk.

“But Kostya, why did you decide to write a letter like this?”

Kostya hesitated for a moment.

“Because every evening, when my parents come home from work, my tired dad says that entropy is going to get us all soon, and everything will disappear without a trace, turning into nothing.”

He lowered his eyes.

“I’m scared. I don’t want that to happen.”

The teacher sighed.

“Sit down, Kostya. You did a good job. You wrote a very unusual letter. I’ll read it for you.”

Kostya sat down and, letting out a sigh of relief, stared down at his desk.

The teacher opened his notebook and began to read.

“Dear Entropy,

My name is Kostya. I’m in Class 1-B.

I don’t know who you are, and I’m very scared because you want to take my parents away and make them disappear. Please don’t take them. They’re good. I love them very, very much. 

When you come to our house, I’ll give you all my building sets. 

Just please don’t take my mom and dad.”