"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.