"The Loose Weave in the Fabric" part 5: culmination

Tiber: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH....ahh...ah...a-

Irene: calm down, please, Tiber...

Tiber: You! How can you speak?!

Irene: because I have vocal cords.

Tiber: no, you didn’t speak before! You have never spoken in 50 years, how can you speak now?

Irene: Shut up! Or do I have to sedate you?

Tiber: why would you sedate me? I am dead, right?

Irene: no, you are not.

Tiber: what is happening? Where am I? This is not a palace, it’s a dungeon. Please kill me if I am not already dead. I do not wish to live anymore. Please, please! You have to let me die! PLEASE! KILL ME! NOW! DEATH IS NOT WORSE THAN WHAT I HAVE BEEN THROUGH!  KILL MEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAA! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Irene: calm down Tiber!

Tiber: NO! YOU HAVE TO DESTROY ME! PLEASE! Please! For your god’s sake, please...*sobbing*

Irene: you should be proud of yourself! You are one of the few people to survive Dr. Orson McLane’s famous Doomsday Solace simulation. It was said that those who survive this simulation learn the true meaning of life, that they learn what the purpose of ‘us’ is.

Tiber: *sobbing* purpose of life...huh *scoffs*...are you toying with me even at this point in time? Did you think I would be that naive? So, do you want to know what the meaning of life is? At this moment, for me, it is being dead. I will live if I die. I want to DIE.

Irene: Tiber! Well, because of your awe inspiring hippocampus, I decided not to disclose the more tedious details to you, but as the case so turns out to be, I have to. Listen. There was a great neuroscientist called Orson McLane. He had a tremendous hypothalamus; brain scans show that most of his brain activity was concentrated on his hypothalamus and cerebellum. You might not understand it because of your limited scientific knowledge...

Tiber: I was a scientist for 15 years; I think I know a few things about brains and whatnot.

Irene: No, you weren’t. It was all in the simulation. If you were, you can prove it to me by telling me the exact speed of light, go on.

Tiber: I know that, it’s...it’s...ahhhhh...it rudimentary knowledge, why can’t I remember that? Is it 34898 miles per hour?

Irene: Wrong again, its 2, 99,792,458 m/s. See, you even have the facts wrong, Tiber, this is what a simulation does to you, isn’t it? Well, Dr. McLane found a way to link your brain into a computer in association with my father, Ian Redding, and started programming simulations into the computer, fed directly into the subject’s, no offence, neural interface directly. Slowly and steadily, he developed a simulation he called the Doomsday Solace simulation, to which you were subjected to. It turned out to be a major scientific development. After sometime, subjects began to die in the simulation, and hence lost their minds in the real world. You and five others haven’t and you are the last one on the list, it is awesome. So, anyway, the DSS (short for doomsday solace simulation, as you may have guessed) is tested for a period of 50 years on a single subject, while his mind is automatically preserved and somewhat his neuron activity increased, his body is preserved by the use of WISPS, The Wulf-Imlauer Somatic Preservation System, developed in 2018 by Albrecht Wulf and Adrian Imlauer, so anyway, the simulation projects your consciousness into a world where there is no life, deleting all your memory, while your brain fills the blanks with whatever explanation it has cooked up. The first half an hour is this process, rebooting your brain according to what it wants to be, amazing? Yeah. Then it just leaves you in a near perfect map of the world to do whatever you please. It was initially developed to experiment upon the ability of the brain to create new memories to complete apparent pre-existing memories which was an empty world in the simulation’s case. Most people lose their minds,  you didn’t, that says that your brain has a very overactive imagination, I suppose. So, do you have any questions?

Tiber: What? You are lying. This can’t be true.

*door opens and closes*

Ian: Irene, what are you doing to subject...uh...343?

Irene: Nothing, dad...

Ian: you have succesfully confused his brain utterly, and told him he as he knows it doesn’t exist. Does that feel like nothing to you?!

Irene: I am sorry, dad, I got carried away...so sorry.

Ian: get out, it’s time.

Irene: okay, I’ll just leave...*whispering* Tiber, be strong, this is not who you are. You are the greatest nobody in the history of the world.

Tiber: what...what is happening? Will I not die?

*Door opening and closing*

                                                                                        

Ian: Tiber, you are pretty much alive, and you are now gifted with longevity. Keep calm, and let us follow protocol, you’ll be okay.

Tiber: what is happening? This can’t be true... did I not discover a way to negate mass?

Ian: No, you did not, it was all a ploy. You need to go to sleep. All will be clear when you wake up. Good Night.

Tiber: but you have to promise me, I will see her when I wake.

Ian: that’s the whole point, Erebus, the whole point.

It has been 50 years since I have been awake in this world with no people. Nothing exists anymore. It’s all a lie. I can see her now, the one who vowed to take me away to the palace within the ground, where all damned souls go to die. Now she can speak, and she wants to take me away. The place is called Prometheus. What now exists, is a not a mystery but truth. I was finally going to die.

"The Loose Weave in the Fabric" part 4

What are we? “Dust.”

And that’s all I have to say. We belong nowhere, we are no one and just walking bone covered with flesh and resuscitated with innate nudges of electricity. We go nowhere and we aren’t meant to go anywhere, but to Hell, for ever being even alive, and that’s our only sin. No other thing can bring you down from grace and fell you to purgatory. There are no seven sins or seven redemptions or seven anything, just you. And you go to hell for living. That is what religion is about. Priests, pastors, preachers, saints, they all have the same ultimate sermon, that we die; and if “thou shalt follow”, you go to heaven, and if not, you go to hell. That is half true for me, because I will only go to hell, no heaven.

I have truly lived, not like any other human being that existed before me, or shall exist after, because I am immortal only to the point where I decide to die. I will probably follow Her into Her palace within the ground.

Hell is within the ground, and the ground is of dust. And from dust we arise and to dust we perish. That is the truth.

An ascetic is blissful and peaceful because he knows the truth, and he is grateful to be graced with that resuscitating spark of electricity. He is happy for being alive, and being alive is our only sin. To revel in sin is our only meditation and it is our only purpose. In the end we are to wither and become what we already are – dust. Nothing we shall ever be can change this. Because we don’t matter, we are nothing, just the scum of the earth, a mistake to be pondered upon.

I am in hell, and I love it. I have revelled in my sins. I have meditated in my own twisted sense. I have achieved what Buddha did – ‘Nirvana’, albeit in my own twisted sense. I turned necrophile for the mutilation I made Kyoko into, a masterpiece in its own right, and now, there exists nothing. Again, I have revelled in sins, and I truly celebrated.

“Sumus nostrum sua demonus”

We have our own demons.

It is time I exorcise mine.

All I have to say is that I am not mad, but I am about to do what a marooned man does – killing myself.

I still have that knife from Düsseldorf, and this is my suicide recording. Goodbye mortal plane, here I come, lovely hell.

I will be a monster I suppose.

She smiles upon me, she laughs at me and she kisses me.

And I close my eyes to rest in a glorious sepulchre of loneliness in suspension.

And I drive my knife into my skull, and she is wailing.

At last I know who she is –

“A Beautiful Death”

I have consorted with her.

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ah ah ahahaahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeee- - -”

And hence, I awake.

"The Loose Weave in the Fabric" part 3

You might be wondering whatever it was that I did in the last 50 years. What I did is what a man marooned on a desolate island does. He waits and hunts for sustenance, until he goes mad and shoots himself with that one bullet and single gram of gunpowder he was given to do it. Trust me, I am not mad, I am completely and inherently sane, and I sure as hell am not just about to shoot myself out of it. I have looked far and wide for Kyoko but no, I have always found her, that infernal being that is always offering to ferry me across the chasm called afterlife into an eternity of torment. I think that she has offered me another choice as well, to be her agent, a catalyst to give her what is hers in the currency of the reaper- souls. To tell the truth, I think I have even lost my love to Kyoko, and started loving her, no, adoring her. Imagine adoring someone that is here only to take you away to your sepulchre.

And I think I know why she is here with me – because I am the last living thing with a soul on planet earth. I love her now, and she is going to stay with me forever in this desolation.

All I’ve written now is in the language of a religious man, a superstitious man, which I was not, before the Folly. I guess people become that way in isolation.  I was once a man with everything there was, and now I have only a single knife, a notebook, charcoal and her with me. Such is the condition when love’s labour is lost. Laugh is what I am supposed to do now, shuffle lewdly towards an end I know not, and she is here to guide me through this labour of love.

I’ve read, and only read because there is no way to test this, that people go mad in isolation and go haywire to destroy everything they see. All my existing life before the Folly, I realize, I had been in isolation. Nope, you read that right. I was isolated before a universal isolation. In the last few years of my life I realized that no person came to me and talked, and they just wanted to keep their distance from me, well, guess what? Fuck them. I say Hell take you, bastards, and spit you back to die again. This is a testimony forged in what is pain not felt. Society is an illusion that the intelligent maggots called humans developed to restrain a social mind from falling apart. We don’t need society to live freely and enjoying life. We are happy aren’t we, my love?

She never speaks, ever. Well, that is how it is. Wonder how you people still live after all that has happened when you were not. To hell with that! So yes, it will be safe to say that I am no longer alive if you are reading a transcript of this or listening to the original or a copy of this recording. This is an update: I am a religious man now. The church did well to kill my parents, fucking pair of faggots. Well, I don’t pity any of them; they go to hell for a thousand sins. I am ashamed to call such an unnatural pairing my filial generation. I will be going to hell as well probably, for being alive longer than which is natural.

I found Kyoko yesterday. She was basking in the glory of midnight sun in Norway. I went to her and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. She turned around and smiled as warmly as she could at me. I cried a lot afterwards.

“Hello, my love”, she said.

“It’s been long”, I sobbed.

“Yes it has. I’m glad that you are safe and still faithful to me”, she said.

“I’m afraid you are deceived”, I regained my composure and said “I have found her.” I pointed in her direction.

“Who are you talking about?” asked Kyoko.

“Her”, I answered, “She’s right there, can’t you see her?”

“Who are you talking about? There is no one there!” she said, exasperated.

“Well you can play your little games forever, but she says hi, and that she is soon going to take you into her underground palace...”said I.

“What? Okay, will you just calm down please! You are scaring me more than what’s possible!” she said and laughed meekly.

“Oh let it be!” I exclaimed “let’s go to sleep”

“Yes, let’s”

So, now she’s sleeping soundly in a nook under a boulder by the fire. I still have the knife from Düsseldorf with me, and I am debating on listening to Her or not. She whispers in my ear to carve out my wife’s long forlorn face and eat some meat for the first time in 50 years.

Good night, reader.

I have done it. I have successfully destroyed my wife’s face. I am laughing hysterically like a maniac! It was so exhilarating and winding and extraordinary! I destroyed the one link in my past. First, I cut her mouth open into a hideous ear-to-ear grin, then I gauged her eyes out with the handle of the knife to make it more painful, I then carved 50 tally marks on her face to show the 50 long years she hid from me in this dismal world. I lay bare her bosom, and ripped open her torso from the neck down to the genitals and tied her up in her own intestines; I burned her then so that she could never see Heaven and be condemned straight to hell!

 And do you know what? I am not remorseful. All I did was for my own good. Being selfish is a survival instinct, and I have embraced it to the brim! And also, I am not responsible for her death; I have just done what I was told!

By her!

It’s so sweet in this world in the middle of the night when the unnatural rays of a midnight sun shine upon your masterpiece. It is the first time that I have done this unholy but redemptive deed, and I might do it again...

I ask myself only this at this moment-

“Why is dawn so beautiful in a moment where the sun never set?”

And now, it’s time for a feast to glorify the ominous dawn!

"The Loose Weave of the Fabric" chapter 2

Now that I’ve slept for the first time in years, I am feeling a little less fatigued in my muscles. She went off to her distant palace within the ground again this morning and has not responded to my shrieks of occupation. So, I let it go, and I walk northward. I am somewhere along the Alps in France, and to tell you, reader, they are magnificent; more so, because there aren’t any human beings around the place. That is the case at every single place that I have been after The Folly. The streets of India have turned out to be the single most tragic place I’ve been to. The charm of the boulevards in India used to be the sheer number of human beings roaming around and scuttling to their callings; the colour of India, the nuances of the visible spectrum, just gone, “POOF!” just gone like a drop in an ocean. Ignore that, and you have with yourselves the most beautiful anthropogenic place on God’s own earth.

That reminds me- “God?”

Well not exactly, He does not exist for me, nor does “Allah” or “Bhagwan” or “Aliens (in the case of scientology)”. During the first 10 years of my lonely journey, I had made it a goal of mine, to destroy every shrine, temple, church, or place of worship that I found along the way. I justified it as revenge.

“Revenge?”

 Yes, revenge. My parents were not exactly a religious bunch, openly defying all the bullshit regulations posted by the Church around my home in Turku, Norway. They were publicly persecuted, socially neglected, and theologically outcast. First thing is, they weren’t allowed to marry, because of being in a homosexual relationship or in layman’s terms “Gay” or in vulgar terms, “faggots”. My two fathers, one of whom was not actually my father, and the other my biological father who my biological mother left for coming out, were the ones that made me feel that I belonged somewhere. At other places, people would harass me because I was different.

And you know what? They killed them.

20 men, in hooded robes, with Molotov cocktails, on a Sunday morning, fresh with dew, right after we came back from church, burnt down my home, with my parents in it.

That’s the day I lost my religion, and thought that I might as well burn it down someday.

I spent the next year moving from place to place as a little vagabond on the streets of Turku. Then, something got into me, and I, being the impulsive hothead that I am, jumped at the first chance to hitchhike on a ship, to Rotterdam, Netherlands. I travelled from there to Amsterdam and lived on the streets for another 3 years. I was a prodigy, which was never successfully utilised, being in a social rejection for the first 12 years of my life. I started writing up hypothesis on my particular piece of Nobel Prize winning research when I was still in Turku. I progressed upon it during my time in the streets. I stole a lot of books and then put them back on after making notes. But that was my life in ignorance, and what do they say? “Ignorance is bliss.”

I met Kyoko there, in Amsterdam. Her father was transferred from Japan, being in a prominent fishing company. He was based in Rotterdam, but wanted his daughter to have a beautiful background for growing up in the form of Amsterdam. She was a prodigy herself. I met her while stealing Stephen Hawking’s “Theory of Everything” from a bookstore. She said that she could take me in, help me study and research.

Hence, her mother became my mother and her father became mine, I felt like I could belong again. We studied hard, got into Harvard, and then continued the research at Cambridge. We won the Nobel Prize 5 years later.

I married Kyoko when we were both 27 years old. She was the love of my life since the folly. 29 years married, separated in a moment. Such mirthful irony doesn’t exist in the new world. I am grateful for this. We were separated, but I never found her remains. That is one reason I search around in the whole big world.

The Congo rainforest is amazing now that there is no threat of spiders biting me in my legs. Siberia is like the white heaven I was lead to believe existed. Sahara is the only place that seems like it has remained untouched, but the empty borrows of desert rabbits and the absence of swallows during migratory season hint otherwise. Nothing is the same.

This is the 30^th of April, 2105, and this is the second journal entry by Dr. Erebus Bjornson.

She has come back, and I am beginning to worry for my life.

Well, on second thought, let’s continue. The sun is setting upon the Alps and the snow remains the desolate reminder of loneliness.

One thing is that I can’t decide if I want to continue my pursuit for a reason to live. I didn’t find Kyoko in 50 years; I doubt I can in the next hundred. So, located a knife out in the kitchen in Düsseldorf last week and I am burning inside to use it on my arms. All I know is that it will be in vain, I will not die, just remain where I am, burning from inside.

Animals are built to adapt in a tough surrounding, and in a suitable environment, they start to consolidate their evolutionary process to match that of their surroundings.

Evolution is a bad thing to be subjected to, and I am the subject of a failed process. “The fittest of the fit survives”, but it is hardly logical to call something fit if there are no other organisms to compare its fitness to.

So is the case with one Dr. Erebus Tiber Bjornson.

"The Loose Weave of the Fabric" Chapter 1

In the moments we are alone, we find only ourselves; and we look at us as we would at others. The subjective nature of our psyche ends, we are no longer open to interpretation and pragmatists are what we become. 

As I now tread the world looking for any other person there exists, I run a full circle and I only end up patting my own shoulder. The apparition, which is but my own shadow, turns around and looks upon me in horror. He runs and never comes back. Only after a horrifying moment I realise that my own human self has left me. He is horrified of what he has become and never wants to stay in the midst of a waking nightmare, which he himself is. He is treading still waters, where the rot of centuries lay decomposing and the water is atrophied; and he looks around to notice a single carcass floating on the black water.  He turns the body upside down to see his own face.

Sometimes another being turns around, looks you straight into the eyes and accepts you for who you are. That happened when I laid my eyes on her. She is too beautiful to be hiding in a desolate dust bowl we call Earth. She has jet black hair falling down to her shoulders, a single tuft of it highlighted with blood red brushing down her face. Her eyes were black, highlighted with crimson; her lips were bright red and full; her cheeks were sunken a little. She wore a soot black eye shadow to highlight those gems within her sockets. She was perfect; almost too perfect for me to find. She told me to do certain things, and I followed, smitten with her beauty.

What I guess is if anybody is reading this, he/she would have already perceived what the core of the emaciated description of these encounters and subsequent introspection is. My mind stands to rot. My soul is virtually non-existent. What remains is my body, cursed to roam the mortal plane as long as it exists along with her. Everywhere, with her, and not my soul...

Well, I am not exactly affected by this, as it is my own undoing that the human world fell. All I wanted was noble as noble goes. 

Oh hell, I presume I have not introduced myself. My name is Dr. Erebus Tiber Bjornson, and I am what used to be a very successful researcher on the effects of correlating momentum and time. I won a Nobel Prize along with my partners Dr. Adam Nyx Carlson, Dr. Kyoko Ikeda and Dr. Dhvani Vaishya.  We introduced an entirely new branch of theoretical physics, dynamic-chronology, which would turn up to be essential in the exploration of adjacent astral systems. It was a leap in scientific studies with the magnitude of infinity, almost literally.

I’m sorry, I got carried away, I should not explain such condense and complicated details to someone whose locations might not have schools. But, it is what it is; it couldn’t be explained more concisely.

So the substance of truth is that we were able to accelerate time. It was a power comparable to those of God, to leap into the future and change it, shape it with your own hands, observe the consequences, and come back to try again. And this was the moment where mankind fell.

We performed experiments with time, and burned an enigma into humanity’s collective mind; looked to never observe the past, or to learn with the present, live in the moment. Our aims were only to conquer our curiosity regarding a basic survival instinct – “What if?”

Nobody died anymore; we would restore our youth with what I had created. We were born in 1999 and lived till infinity. It’s hilarious if you ask me, about how anybody died, well they did not, and they just got lost in the endless plane of time. Looks like the past had finally caught on. Hence, here I am, with just a bloody notebook to keep me company.

I survived because as everything, infinity had a loophole. While all my fellow human beings were busy travelling to and fro into the future, I was busy – busy aging. When the age of humans ended, I was 56 years old. And when they got lost unto time...

...They died peacefully.

Or that’s what I want to believe anyway, I was asleep when it happened.

It has been 50 years since then, and I haven’t aged a single bit, in fact, I have aged down once, when I used the technology based on my theories to turn time back, once. It was a disaster. I came out aged 17 years old, and rendered effectively immortal. What has happened is beyond even me, but I guess it is an incongruity at work. I don’t even care anymore.

The time-changing events 50 years ago should have made the world a more advanced place, but they didn’t. We still drove petrol cars, got electricity from nuclear generators, and went to the shopping malls to buy clothes, drove to the grocery stores for our daily needs, and so on. The Folly was a lethal trend. It was like a second life for people, they did the grudging work daily and monotonously, but at home, they exploited the space-time continuum. It ate away their souls, and still never ceased to amaze them.

I have been walking around the globe in the time since. I’ve been to London, Delhi, Moscow, and Paris, and whatever place you can think of, except the Americas, there’s the Atlantic between me and them. But I’ll go there someday, that was a promise to someone I love.

So, today it is the day Tuesday, 19^th of April, 2105, and my first journal entry. Trust me; it’ll not be the last like all the others.

Right now, I have to sleep; she is calling me to bed.