My Friend has Been Living in an Alternate Reality

Part 1

In order for me to tell you about this, you're going to need to know a bit about Clint Rockwell first.

Now, I've known him for around eight years. He was always... strange to say the least. But not in the sense that it made him an outcast. The opposite, actually. I guess strange wasn't the right word. Let's call him exceptional. If I were to give you a quick run-down of his life, it'd look something like this:

Straight A's from primary to post-secondary. Full rides to Ivy leagues. Internship offers out the ass after just his undergraduate year. Astonishingly charismatic and handsome. It was to the point where nobody even seemed to be bitter towards him. Not jealous either. They just admired him.

But despite all the parties he was invited to, all the attempts at friendship, all the girls that threw themselves at him... he chose to be a loner. In fact, I was one of the only people he talked to. Couldn't tell you why he chose me as an acquaintance. He just did. And let me tell you, I was about as average as average gets, set for a life of mundanity.

It all started in seventh grade. I just failed a geometry test. To be fair, I didn't really study for it... but whatever. Clint was sitting right by me. I saw him take one disaffected glance at his paper before putting it down. He got 100, of course. I guess he saw me staring, because he looked down at my paper and chuckled. It was slightly embarrassing, of course. But instead of hurling an insult, he asked me if I had wanted come over after school and study. Maybe play some video games. I agreed. That's when I started to get a glimpse into his ideals.

You see, he was never satisfied with anything. I remember our conversations regarding what we wanted to do in the future. I had all the generic answers. Buy a Lamborghini, a big house in Hollywood, marry Megan Fox. Yeah, I was that asshole. But Clint... he wanted something different. He had bigger aspirations.

"Adventure" He told me.

"Going somewhere uncharted. Discovering something new, you know? Something that nobody's seen."

At that time, I didn't know what he meant.

"What, like Jupiter or some shit?" I asked him. He just chuckled. "Maybe. Something like that." At that time, I couldn't fathom why he would want to go into space. "Nothing's up there." I told him. "What's the point?" He just gave me an amused look. But it wasn't one of contentious superiority. He wasn't like that. He knew that I couldn't have understood, but he didn't fault me for it.

"Well, think about it. People's lives have become lackluster." He went on. "When we have all the comforts in the world, everything turns into structure. Routine. Nothing new. Our destiny decided by the time we're out of college. Who the hell wants to get caught up in the rat race and just chase monotony day-to-day? That's the worst possible outcome. Look, that's why we watch movies and read books. Escapism. Looking for stories that are infinitely more satisfying than the one we're living in. I mean, what do we really have to look forward to?"

He talked a lot like this. But it didn't sound suicidal... it was something else. This guy beyond was driven, I could see it. But to be honest, I couldn't tell you what he did in the long hours he spent in his room alone. He never talked about it. By the time he went off to CalTech and I went to Penn state, we started drifting apart. In fact, after the first year of his master's degree, he stopped talking to me completely. Stopped talking to anybody, actually. When he didn't go home for spring break, his folks called the cops. Apparently, he'd stopped going to class as well. They looked for him, but there were no traces. It was a cold case going nowhere. However, I do remember the last time we had communicated. He'd sent me a Facebook message. This is all that it said:

"Do you want to be part of something? It's a project I'm working on. I can explain more later."

I'd sent him a message asking about specifics, but he never responded. That was the last I'd heard of him for about seven years. That was before he knocked on my door in the middle of the night some hours ago.