CHAPTER 3
“Apocalypse, Apocalypse, Apocalypse...” the word repeated itself inside my head as we walked home through the valley. But the talking goat and her absurd revelations were far from the strangest thing happening to me anymore. I still can’t find the right words to describe what I was experiencing back then. It seemed like everything around me was suddenly... alive.
Everything was conscious. The soil, the flowers, the hill we were about to climb; I could feel their pulse in mine! It thought I was having a panic attack, but instead of my own heartbeat, I heard theirs. I kept looking around me, making sure I still had my senses, my sense of direction. When we I finally saw the Cyane River crossing the southern horizon, I found the strength to talk.
“Finally..!” I shouted relieved.
“Is this where we’re heading?” asked the goat.
“No, we’re heading north. But at least I know now, we’re not lost.”
“So, all this time we’ve just been wandering. Nice.”
“Umm, what did you mean? Before, when you mentioned about the Apocalypse.” I asked.
The goat gasped. “Seriously? You don’t know?”
I pinched my left arm as hard as I could, determined to wake up. The pain travelled all the way through my skin to my brain and back, but the goat did not disappear.
“Maybe I don’t know, because it’s not happening. None of this is, is it?” I replied.
“Are you calling me a liar?” the goat protested.
“No, I’m calling you a lie.”
The goat remained silent. Once more I touched the back of my head and then looked at my hand for signs of hemorrhage. No blood, no blood at all. It was clean. But right there, at that moment, it struck me.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?”
“I hope not!” She cried out. “Brrrrr! Ghosts give me goosebumps.”
Yeah. I was dead alright. I had to be, right? Or maybe not. You see, many things had changed about life and death those days, things I was not aware of.
After all, how could I, the last inhabitant of a deserted village in a small island, ever know what was going on at the other side of the world? In a cosmology lab at MIT? And if I have to be completely honest, I had no idea what cosmology was or... that MIT actually existed. I thought it was some kind of fictional university used as reference in old school sci-fi movies. As for Bruce Lee, the one I knew was a karate master, not a 19-year-old genius that would destroy the world just by looking through a dark lens.
“It’s all his fault. Bruce Lee’s” the goat said, “I know, who gives a nerd like this, a name like that, right? But you know...PARENTS! Always, overly optimistic about how their kids are going to turn out. I mean, bro! Look at the mirror. We are talking DNA here and a good 50% chance that your kid is going to turn out exactly like you (no matter how disappointing that may sound).” The goat began to bleat. "Baa, baa! At least this Bruce may be completely useless in kung fu stuff, but he surely kicked the shit out of the Dark Matter.”
“He did what?!”
“Imagine this; a skinny little Bruce carrying a dark lens to the other side of his lab, placing it under a particle collider, that descends from the ceiling and hits the lens with cosmic rays!” The goat paused for a moment.
“OK...” I pretended to understand.
“The Dark Matter? I’m sure you ‘ve heard of Dark Matter before!” she exclaimed.
“Yes, of course I have. I just never understood what it was.”
“Well, it was dark! Until that idiot undarkened it!” she replied with a muffled voice.
So basically what happened was that this guy, Bruce, he made a device- well, it looked like a simple pair of sunglasses really, but these sunglasses, they identified certain dark matter particles and translated them into brain recognizable forms. Like all great disasters, it was in the middle of a very cold winter night when he finally perfected them. He left his lab and hurried down to the building that was overlooking Charles River. It was the oldest building in the campus, so it made sense for his little experiment.
He stood at the beginning of the Infinite Corridor with the sunglasses in his hand. The corridor was completely empty. No one else was there. He put on the glasses and looked through them. The empty corridor was now filled with human figures hurrying up and down. These people, they had different clothes on, different styles, different mannerisms. They were obviously people from different eras. Some of them were talking to each other. Others were just walking through. A few were looking at the equation boards, trying to solve the unsolved mathematical riddles.
Bruce took the glasses off. The infinite corridor was once again completely empty and silent.
Quickly, struggling to believe in his own eyes, Bruce put the glasses back on. The people re-appeared. Bruce finally screamed with joy for his scientific recovery. He jumped around, dancing and singing. After a few circles around himself, he took his glasses off again. Only, this time the people did not disappear.
“I think this one can see us!” shouted from the back of the infinite corridor, a bearded man wearing tights.
All the spirits turned at once and pointed at Bruce.
CHAPTER 4
How do I know all this? She told me everything on our way home. And I got concerned. I got seriously concerned, because at that moment I knew I could not have imagined it and that this couldn’t be a dream. We dream what we know, and I had no way of knowing all that. All I understood was -
“You mean he saw... ghosts?”
“If ghost stands for the surviving consciousness of everyone that has ever died, and for some reason it has remained in the same space and time, then yes. He saw ghosts.” she answered sarcastically.
“But only he saw them, because he had these sunglasses?” I asked.
“Initially, but-”
“So, what do we care? It’s his apocalypse. Not ours!” I concluded.
The goat was quick to dismiss me. “I’m afraid, it doesn’t really work like that. You see, the mind sees what it logically considers possible. And what you people consider possible depends greatly from what the people around you believe as being true.”
The incline of the hill and the load of information were beginning to unnerve me. The goat, however, went on. Walking AND talking.
“So, as more and more people get convinced that this is real and that they can see this new realm, the two realities will eventually merge into one. For everyone. People and spirits alike. In time you will be sharing the same space and time, glasses or no glasses.”
I tried to do the math, but it had been decades since I last tried. “How many people have lived and died before us? Ten? Twenty billion?”
“More like a hundred.” she replied.
“One hundred billion?! But, but... Where are all these people going to go?”
“Hopefully not where we are going!” the goat blurted.
We had finally reached the top of the hill. A small village stood before us. My village.
TO BE CONTINUED
You can read the previous episode here Freedom Day; Episode 1