Chapter Prologue
Creation is such a fickle thing.
Creation; is a cycle of never-ending contradiction that forever holds to the wheel spokes of a dying universe as it coasts along a road of time toward a destination of uncertainty. It can happen in the blink of an eye, taking place within the immeasurable moments of reality, only to fade in the moment of its realization. More often than not, it is a lazy sluggish thing. A slow progression that comes from selective consequence. Sometimes accidental, and in some cases intentional, it is an act that eons struggle with, as something from as small as a microorganism to as large as a supermassive star, can play the lead role.
There is a slow but certain climax of realization of everything to be created in its time, as some living things to attain un-life will see the permanents of stone, and steel, fade before them; others will not, but everything fades knowing the true nature of forever in sense as time is still yet only a fraction of itself in perspective of those who see it. All things are destined to fade within the ever blistering torment of the hour glass. As nothing; is destined to last forever.
This cycle of destruction is a vicious one, life, and death; it is a law that only for a fraction of life’s existence within a young universe has been known to all without definition. This law is simple, and in its simplicity is so complex that it is rooted in all things, painting a tapestry of fate that feeds its growth in the blood of those soon to be forgotten by the roses that their destruction helped bloom.
Creation, only has so much room, as the universe itself is limited even in its amount of free energy and meter for life. It is a luxury to be given or taken, for if something is to live it must be that something else; must die.
I find myself a watcher of a moment in time, an instant where soon, these laws of the universe are too abruptly and violently apply as those to die in the name of creation, are never exempt from these laws.
This group of beings who call themselves; humans, live on a blue star floating in a sea of blackness called Earth. A planet now more alive than it has ever been, but; only in its thriving nature of giving birth to wondrous and deadly new life. The human race, finds itself now dying, choked and sufficed by the thriving nature of stronger life around it.
Tension is thick in the air as a moment unfolds on a stifled rock of a lonely blue planet, One that an entire race waits in anticipation for, as a new light held in the hand of man’s combined efforts, will lead humanity from the depths of their dark struggle. A project of science put together out of desperation, with limited resources and even less time to complete, it has been a undertaking of a race nearly extinct, in the workings of a last ditch effort for survival for many of earth revolutions around its small sun. But now; after billions of miles traveled through space; and eons of progress through the cosmos. Humanities last torch of hope is now soaked and weighed in treachery. Beings most unlike men in their nature of power and mortality stomp about on mankind’s ant-like efforts to climb from a fate of extinction, keeping them always underneath the watchful eye of titans, poised and ready to destroy, as is their nature to hate all thing to seek the pity of the powerful.
Closed away in a secret place hidden from the eyes of the curious. Emotions and personal boundaries have been crossed and tested in a bitter cask confinement. Friend-ships have been made and broken, and in what was to be a moment of great scientific triumph, is now also a place of broken hearts and shattered bridges of intimacy, once strong; they now pave the path to freedom in ruin as titans drink of this concoctions well awaited brew, and become sated bye it’s misery.
I have watched these moments blossom in the dark like so many fireworks, moments that send ripples through the vastness of life itself. None of them were aware, that the actions of an emotion in time hold just as much weight in their accounts as the project that they so desperately piece together. Life, love, passion, these elements of creation are the same in the makeup destruction for each has a counterpart that finds itself hand in hand with what makes life possible, and in this particular scene of mixing desperation’s and betrayals, fate has used this bonding epoxy of creation, to forever weld the hopeful outcome of mankind’s efforts to tragedy, and leave them with only death, hate, and emptiness.
Is it intelligent to hope, as they once did? I have often wondered that in my searching through the blackness that I have become confined in. Hope has for some time left me, as a fool errand in passing, but through this window, I watch the world with. Hope, was the only thing that had brought the world’s greatest minds into a single a place, and hope would help them try to find a way to fight the poisonous nature of their planet with a substance unknown to their limit of expanded science. Still yet, they are so clueless, as it is also that hope, would now proceed to murder them in the peak of their lives with chaos and pain. A wise entity once told me, that to hope is a fool’s errand; and in this case; they were right.
The world depended on the success of this small group of fools. Each of them working with a substance unable to be found on the human periodic table, an enigma to all known elements of matter. None of them understand fully what it is, or have any idea how such a substance could even come into existence, but still; like fools they try. It is their hope that caused them to trip over their own equations of logic in a race against the clock, but it was only after running in circles that one of them did finally stumble across an answer that came only by complete accident.
Clumsy is man’s nature, but who says anything in the universe to progress has ever had a definite direction.
Miscalculation was assured, but yet they still struggle and fight for answers even I new and ever inconsistent developments, and test run after test run did finally brings them to a moment of truer realization, but still; man’s science, like them, is often imperfect and flawed in the worst ways.
The misplacement of a decimal point, the insufficient use of the number of pie in a triangulation of some geometric anomaly bound in the energy matrix of reflexive proton bombardment; even a single missing number in the equation of the tensile strength of the materials used, could mean the end of them. Equations fill entire chalkboards, stretching past the boundaries of slate black stone onto walls of steel and glass. For all, they had become the maddening lullabies for the minds that watch and trace over them.
Each line tells its own story in the language of mathematics, scribbled onto walls or scratched into metal with nails, corrected, and then corrected again. Each equation in its scrolling’s and scribblings tells of disputes and arguments, ones of intellect, physical conflict, embrace. The blood of someone fills in the missing gaps of a slow and brutal crawl towards knowledge, as it stains the material of the walls, all of this madness and suffering, now comes down to a moment that will take only a seconds to miss, and be over in the blink, of a mind’s eye and only for the sake of a dying race of people, on a deadly planet, that itself is one day destined, to be destroyed.
Like the pieces of a chessboard, dictated by scientific notation, they take their positions marked bye symbol of respective facility staff, as stopped from they’re duties by this event. Each rook, bishop, knight, and king and queen sit, ready. This high up on the hierarchy of positions, apply the right equation at the exact moment it is needed to keep their hope healthy and stable. The group of these pieces is a mix of both males and female humans, some of them sporting different colored coats as a means of identification, in order to determine rank within their field of logic and understanding in nature. Reds, blues, greens, whites, and yellows, all made to show the government of or origin, ranked in calculative status within the atomic think tank of this latest breakthrough in technological scientific fields. Head scientists and assistants ranked in symbols of contribution.
I was in this group, one of these humans. One of the proud people trying to find hope for our future. I had witnessed for myself the moments that had passed between our lives slipped through our fingers like the ashes of ghosts, with human eyes. But now, as I see it from a changed perspective, I lose myself within the confines of my own scattered awareness. I was there, I know this much, but who was I? I do not remember.
The piece I played in this game of hearts was a mystery as I would tell it now. Was I the bishop in love sworn to another purpose, The knight charged to protect, the rook made to clean and per sue the stray information, or the unnamed prince, waiting to be born? I could have been the pawn, sent to seek and uncover secrets? But the answer to any of these riddles, escapes me, now and forever as a game of betrayal had changed the meaning of everything.
I remember the woman, who sits behind the lead desk in a lumbar supporting chair. Her belly is large, filled with a new life that is almost ready to meet the world. The world that at this moment looks as though it as a bright as a newly formed star. A place where, children; may one day play in the forests and sunshine like they did eons ago, and breath the air unfiltered into their lungs and exchanging it for laughter and happiness.
All of us are waiting in anticipation for the big moment of the years of tense thought and close quarter living. Stuffed into a top secret facility from which none of us had been allowed to leave for the duration of a project’s length.
The woman with child looks up and smiles into the eyes of a man that puts a hand on her shoulders from behind. Sharp, handsome, manly features are seen smiling back as their eyes meet in the glimmer of hope that they share, for this new world of dreams, is soon to be born much like their young one.
Everyone in the room sits in wait for the moment as a timer slowly counts down from a high atomic numeral. Reaching a series of numbers that start with an odd sequence of scientist code, symbols that measure the amount of energy being applied to the unique atomic nature of the substance that they have studies for years.
“Omega Ten, omega nine, omega eight....” Says a crystal toned computerized voice, in monotonous sequence.
Champagne glasses and a bottle of none alcoholic drink of a synthetic make sit on a table behind them. The glasses ready to be filled with a carbonated liquid after being gripped in success. Triumph is something everyone hopes will take place, but in the back of everyone’s minds, they all suspect something, will most certainly go wrong. We were prepared for disaster, but not as prepared as we had hoped.
No one could see the future for sure. Prediction and calculations are things that have a large possibility of happening but have an equal or greater chance of becoming the exact opposite. The predictions of this group did not foresee the soon to be future, as our eagerness had so blinded us to the precision of the moment. With that stated, something else in play, a game piece not meant for this checkered board of conflicts, had sought to destroy all of us entirely.
A snake was with use then. A viper of venomous words constricting every moment of every realization. Squeezing tighter at every defeat and every triumph, whispering poison into our veins, and devoured what would be our salvation.
Some of us resisted these whispers better than others and found comfort in the hands of those we loved. But; it was one man in particular who felt the full effects of this serpent’s pressure. As he, was neither strong, in body, or nerve.
He was not more athletic, or more handsome than most, but it was something else that made him more dangerous than most any man, a dangerous cunning, devilish intelligence more intense than any mans, keen enough to peel away the thick skin many secrets in science dwelt underneath.
I watched him take out a pair of thick glasses from the pocket of his coat. Their frames are bent and broken, uneven in their placement as they have been treated so roughly, handled by the hands of someone who has hammers for fists and the intention to cause harm. But these are fitting and reflective of his own condition, as his face is cut and bruised in many places. A monument of injuries showing that recently, he had something with hammers for fists, and a weighted conviction bearing down on him with the intent to establish a knowledge of its own. One of pain, and a lesson in manors.
The injured mans glasses are bound together in places with the technology of the time, cracked in the glass lenses that slowly repair themselves with a technology infused into their very molecules. He puts his broken spectacles on his face. This man with such blind ambition, but only so he can better watch lost moments of love and comfort slip away from his grasp with a blank expression. Watching an ever expanding distance that is filled in with the concrete nature of hatred and awkward He loved her once, and shared with her a moment that saved his life in a place much like this one, she kept him from falling into madness, and it was his hope that this net would find him once again in the second trip to a darker side of himself, it was this hope that leads him to agree to be confined here in this prison of criminal genius. But to be said simply, and forever, this was not to be, and without this net to catch him, it was a snake hidden in whispers that found him instead. No amount of his vast and almost limitless intelligence could make her love him now, and to all cause of this reaction, one outcome was now assured.
“Omega four.... Omega three...”
Everyone sits at the ready, but the nervous and hopeful smile out their concerns as the time of reckoning approaches. Speeches have been written, jokes have been scribbled out, ones that I only know now as I watch the moment out of time, but none of them will be heard, as even words will soon turn to ash in the moments to come.
We all turn our heads toward the thick sheet of glass that separated us from another room in the high-tech facility. Protecting us hopefully from whatever unseen forces that may find their way out of the experimental shell of the thick metal device. A device that now begins to power up and produce a light unlike any spectrum is ever seen through earth filter. Some that will never be witnessed by anyone ever again in reality, but only in their dreams and nightmares.
There is silence now in the room as everyone watches closely in anticipation. The device they had all been working so long to put together now coming to live for the first time. But like many things to be created by men, monsters are often born, and these monster often turn on their creators, but only because of the evils that go into their creation. Needless to say, creation often ends in catastrophe.
Sirens begin blaring as the timer counts down, the machine in question kicks into full power, and reaches its moment of greatest instability. The heat in the room becomes suddenly and incredibly intense. Causing all but a few to sweat with the immense amount of energy being forced against their poor’s, salt and liquid turning to crystal before hitting the ground. This moment of instability, however, was anticipated, simply an equation in their calculations that was expected for some time. Already, buttons are being pressed on steel tables made to withstand the odd mix of energy now being forced against every molecule in the room, champagne bottles split a crack open, unable to withstand the pressure being placed on their electromagnetic bonds.
Each of the scientists works frantically to equal out the energy spikes that now suffocate the area, some of them are successful, but others are unable to take the pressure that begins to lapse in their coordination. And so, mistakes go uncorrected.
At this moment of a retelling, I cannot help but feel a type of, sorrow overtake me. As this moment is like watching the already dead struggle to cling to live as none of them know what is to happen next, none of them know that they are only now shadows of ghosts soon to be caught in a wave of anti-atomic destruction. I have no tears left to shed for this moment, but if I did, I would surely be crying now.
“Omega one......” the automated voice blurts out in electric tones, as the microphone is soon to be destroyed in the mix of the frantic moment. But before everything becomes too much to bare, someone hits the cutoff switch to the machines power source. Suddenly, everything dies down. Some have gone into shock and seizure, while others, of a stronger will, manage to hold themselves together. With the machine powered off, most are just happy to be alive. One of the couples holds one another in the passing of the near death experience. While everyone else on sight, doctors of a medical respect, rush about to help those who have gone into shock and lie semi-unconscious on the floor, but in these happenstances like glass slippers on sheets of paper, disaster, soon angrily stomps in.
“Omega Zero....” The words are heard to everyone’s surprise, and confusion is now the epitaph of the moment. The machine suddenly powers on, and quickly reaches full power operating in full function, and causing the room to quickly quake. Everyone is either floored or brought to their knees, and no one can reach the emergency shut off switches.
The man with the broken glasses begins to chuckle as everyone’s struggles in a panic to reach whatever controls they can, crushing gravity now too intense for most to handle. None of them know exactly what he had just done. Or what still lies in wait in the room on the other side of the glass wall, but like shadows of ghosts, they will never know for sure.
Some people give in to their fate, no one prays to god as he has been gone for some time. But in their frantic search for answers, some concede to the belief that fate, or whoever held the iron pen of such paving’s, now dictate that they all now die. They frantically search for the answer through themselves, some are found but others, are lost to grief.
Computer screens implode as radiation energy inside them is used to crush them from the outside in, this is the fate of anything to hold any amount of radiation machine or otherwise. The holographic projections hold out in their fiber optic nature and tell of a glimpse of a story of evil. I myself had not realized until my will to know had powered me to this point of viewing, but in the thousands of repeated viewings to pass before my eyes, I have pieced together a face that can be seen, laughing, one that is simply, not human.
It only appears for a moment, then is gone, disappeared into the moving explosion of a wall that now consumes and crushes everything that it touches. This wave of energy was only the beginning, I remember it was relatively painless, but only to the body as it tore through one’s very soul. I remember that as it passed over me all of the bacteria on one’s skin began to crystallize. It was only when trying to move or feel, did the pain set in. All soft tissue exposed to the air and the bacteria in it, found itself attacked by the knives of spirits, and the flesh sliced by the razors of once living things.
Some cry and fall to their knees. Others, stumble about in confusion causing themselves more pain than necessary. Most are too full of panic, frozen like statues covered in frost, kept in a place where a blizzard had struck them, blank stares on their faces, they become completely covered in thin but hard crystal.
It was the second wave that hurt the most, physically, as it caused the metals an inorganic alloys of the human anatomy to super mass after atomic excitement, and then crystallize, everyone moving soon became glued in a state of agony, stuck in the amber of moment of their last thoughts as their body’s burst with crystal formations. Those who are wearing glasses, or have synthetic value to their anatomy, are now shocked or blinded by a small explosion that takes place less than a centimeter away from their faces, or more painfully, deep within their bodies. One man’s chest is torn to pieces as the synthetic blood in his body reacts heavily to this energy, removing all the skin from him in the flash of a second, then turning him to stone.
The woman with child, has her face bloodied as thorns pierce her skin, but the man with the self-repairing spectacles has his eyes destroyed almost completely, his glasses made from a more specific alloy, they ignite like powder kegs in a grease fire.
This was not what the man with the broken glasses wanted, I’m sure; a slow and agonizing death of immense suffering, but less so to see his love suffer almost as much as he does, to feel her dying, so close to him. A theory brought him to a different conclusion, and reality would now punish him for that.
The machine is white hot now, the metal used to cover it to focused into an amplifying crystal of odd shape and complexity, the energy core held inside the liquid crystal complex now getting ready to let loose the last wave of its deadly creation. Most have turned to stone at this point, but still, some manage to resist the process of atomic petrification through sheer will and hold the ones they cared for, one, last, time.
They struggle to find the sight of their graves, the ones who love even in death. Pieces of stone flesh break away from them as stiff movements send shocks through their fragile cores, body parts go missing as they struggle to hold shape, death now certain, it the only thing that keeps them from becoming dust. Other, cowards, still try to run and lose their legs, the brave stay to face what is inevitable, but lesser men and women shatter, and become whispers in a
Symphony of destruction.
The lovers, with the unborn child between them, are set apart by a small distance, the man uses his will and strength to fight his way to the only one he has ever cared for. Pieces of his arms shatter and fall way as he pulls himself up to face her, nothing left but the bones inside them. Tears fall from his eyes as he does this final act of caring, the pain almost too unbearable to stand, but somehow; he manages to keep himself together, and put himself in a position to shield his wife and child from the oncoming blast. A futile effort, if I have ever witnessed one. But, it wrenches my heart none the less to watch, as the both of them are unaware that for some time their child in its womb, has been long dead.
Nothing can survive what comes. If there is anything he could do to let them live at the expense of his own existence, he would gladly do it, to save them. The sacrifice of his arms and life, however, is not enough, as fate demands a heavy toll.
The woman he protects, blinded by stone, can sense what he is trying to do through sheer emotional attunement. She can sense him getting closer to her, and as she nearly breaks herself to sand closing her arms around his head, the last wave passes through them all.
Time slows down. The Machine has erupted. It takes years for the blast to reach them in a sense, even though it has already hit them. In time, it is never to happen, but in consequence of reality, the blast is stopped by nothing. It is an instant stretched by the warping of gravity as it is destroyed, and as the white hot blast engulfs all of them, it is being consumed by the beginning of the universe, so destructive, and it recreates the meaning of the word.
Time is molten, space is like iron, gravity, like the life blood of fate, what was crystal now becomes soft tissue, which then becomes something new, both and neither at the same time. Muscle is ripped from bone replaces with the audacity of a black hole or star, and both turned into something that is neither matter nor energy, but as indestructible as will itself.
I weep for them, I do in earnest, for now, they are no longer what they loved, or knew, they are something else, something that the laws of the universe will seek to destroy, and violate its laws. Destruction has favored the fallen, but to only know a break from the laws, and create its own.
Nerves and organs are reduced to dust in the flash of an explosion never before seen in this universe. A type of destruction that makes a hydrogen atom sick with distaste. So proportionate to that of explosive atoms energy that not even the rage of it by the ton could produce such a blast. Atom, quarks, electrons protons and neutrons, separated like slices of subatomic bread by a knife of unimaginable power, it engulfs the entire island the experiment is taking place on. The un-atomic energy of pure destruction, the forces of creation combined into a single explosion of energy. Water becomes solid, turned into something new completely, and what was once and Ancient Island of the Caribbean sea known as Cuba, is left as an alien mass.
Screams that are never heard as words amplify and are then silenced. Replaced by dust and ash in the destruction of something that is more than light. Nothing remains that once was, only things that will never again be the same. Shadows of anything that could cast such have been burnt through walls like fire, walls, in turn, fused into crystals and boiling matter, a matter that glows hot with pressure as It struggle to exist within this universe that tries so hard to reject it, staying true to their maker.
It is a super exotic chemical reaction of unthinkable outcomes, and wondrous new matter the likes of which no-one in this world has ever seen, however, there are remnants of bodies that stand out in the vast enigma of ashes. Bodies turned to sundered sculptures, that each grain of matter is now pressed into a crystals harder than that of a diamond. The only evidence, of what was.
At this moment, nothing notable is to be witnessed, the air in this spot if the world cools and after weeks of harsh storms and ever changing atmospheric conditions so powerful as to bring about global climate change the likes of which the planet has never known or faced.
I was unaware for some time how long I sat in that place, as it seemed that all awareness had been scattered from me. But, as I watch now I am able to look upon my own grave, a grim forbearance of a monument to my own demise. A fate worse than death was soon to let itself loose upon the world. Like a butterfly forming in a chrysalis, cocooned and enclosed, it would soon bear wings of impossible disaster.
I would sit undisturbed for what seemed like millennia in a time compressed state, as it would be, that for some time, free from the odd rules that now dictate our transformations that human life would not return to this place for years. Others, of the curious nature of science, would only stumble upon us in an effort to only place flowers of knowledge against our graves, tracing the evidence in assumption to what had happened to our corpses.
These men and women would try to identify what went wrong, coming to a conclusion that their search that would make no sense of what they had come across in the odd statues that remained. Figures frozen in agony, in an explosion that left nothing of any building. The world would slowly be made aware of what was found, the reports to go out telling of value in the matter crested, as well as the gruesome fate for some now made monument to their own demise. All nations shuttered in rage, and our demise would be the subject of many provocative questions laid at the feet of political mistrust.
In the foundations of a quickly approaching change, Martyrs, where named. Some of them created to fuel the propaganda of warring nations’ dispositions of hatred towards their enemy’s. A war was started in cold furnace, hidden in embers as a silent knife was enforced against an emotion said to be at the root of a problem that was never truly identified, but linked in tow to what the world’s controller’s, political killers and government spec ops wanted.
They chose a symbol, took their sides, in a war colder than that of a winters open grave, a still fresh calling in their minds of what it means to die for foolish things, and be immortalized for it. The plan was simple, to remove destruction from the human mind, to ban and repel what makes human week in relying on others, a hatred for any and all weakness. Ones like love, and compassion, and faith.
Months pass. The investigation launched turns up no real answers in science and is there for abandoned. The nations, who had a stake in the new technology being developed at this particular facility located on the island, salvaged whatever they could as they point blame and weapons at one another, only a new material of energetic quality are recovered, and a variety could now be brought to each nation,. This gave humans more reasons to fight and hate each other. Politicians, Dictators, the soon to become leaders of totalitarianism Democracy’s begin to question each other’s motives. The words of sabotage and betrayal are thrown around like flaming pillows, chaff scattering about on contact as to make a mess of everything keeping the public distracted and confused as to the true nature of their accusations. The embers of War grow hot in the wind, isolationism, and common enemies are established. Something mankind knows they cannot survive, but in light of this new disaster. It can’t be helped. No one knows how or why someone would commit such a crime against all of them. No one is willing to take credit for ending Earth only hope and all weapons are pointed everywhere, even internally, never looking up to see the titans I play, seen by only so few.
This was to be the end of hope for humanity, lost in a bitter struggle of words and evidence. The laws of this universe so bitterly apply, man created and destroyed and their for created again in a slowly dyeing cycle. Destined to fade. But in order for something to die, it must frost live, and to live is to fight against destruction, as it is only a part of the path to creation. New life that would soon emerge into the world, power full things that would show a new choice hidden within the sand. The would see cycle, the flow of the universe, broken,and bridge the gap between broken realms, titans and gods, monsters and men, life and death. For, to become unimportal to is to watch time fade itself, stone become steel and bone become ash.
It is an undertaking, of the intent.