The Day The Other Humans Came.

Chapter Five:

The lights streaked through me, invited me and toyed with the very motes of my essence. We are all stardust, a pixie at my shoulder breathed reverentially. Insubstantial transformed to a freedom, a weightlessness and wonder that had no equal and courted no reciprocation. Blackness arcing and bonding the myriad soup of stretched hues with a inexplicable complicated simplicity... the seams of existence itself. "I" came to meaningless pieces in this place, identity meant many things here, though still pointless at a fundamental level. Some iota of me still masqueraded as consciousness and ran through the panoply of emotion, more fleeting and numerous than the colours blinding 'my eyes,' the appendages lingered somewhere, disembodied amid this ether of all ethers. This spark of awareness pondered on my destination, the ultimate question with the most elusive answer, made all the more real in a vacuous place of farthest reaching potential. Forward time and speed raced with zero motion, the ironic dance of eternity, "I" realised...

Everything ceased with the immediate pace it had begun. Lights halting to utter darkness, yet such a volume of potential contained itself within that night that I felt like an audience watched me. I was a gladiator of creation in a Coliseum of those willing me to bestow meaning upon them. "Where am I?" I asked, "where does it feel like?" The monotone of the 'alien' demanded. A question within a question, just what I need in this place! Colours had switched from horizontal to vertical, different shades puffing up slowly to nowhere, like cosmic jellyfish through a primordial ocean. Somewhere, the 'alien's' awareness tarried on the brink of feeling, his being was the only aspect of this place that gave off a sense of being 'skewed.' Only the void embracing and repulsing me felt secure, certain... me. "We're inside me?" I ventured, and gained an answer. Tingling nerves in my chest, erupting in will-o-the-wisps, illuminating this perpetual column with recognition flourishing as fireworks. "You are correct," my companion replied, "we currently inhabit the sub-atomic levels of your being... the best place for any journey into the very fabric of the universe." I turned slowly, taking in the uniform majesty of this place, standing inexplicably on a platform in the midst of the permanent abyss plunging into all the things I could be. "What next?" The invisible man had all the answers but none of this insight, the place clung to me like sweat in humidity, dulling and sharpening the locale, a blink and breath of the problems stalking my entire life, quick sharpening before the laziness of bluntness gained dominance. "That interplay is vital to the very energy that makes you unique," the 'alien' weighed in on my malaise, smoothing protruding, aching swells of dejection in the blanket of me out. "The life you inhabit on earth may appear mundane, but your society is meaningless. Your version of Homo Sapiens are yet to reach that conclusion."

Hypnotised by my comrade's voice and the lethargic ballet of the lights gliding constantly upwards around me, serenity washed over me, a raft of bubbling warmth, softening all of me internally and externally. In the innermost sanctum of me (here) everything worked on a plan to appease me, inside and out, it beat with the pulse of all things, as all people did, but in me the universe secured a hook, a vested interest. My companion circled me, motion raising static on my soul, electric in his steps and intent, but there was a rot within him, I sensed an illness that all his elevated advancement could not put to sleep... "you're dying." I gasped, cold lodged in the lower half of my stomach. "We all are," for once his monotone sounded heavy with emotion, "our civilisation tried to pierce the edges of existence, in concord with another civilisation, it failed and spewed energy in reverse into reality, sickening it, causing it to die. No people like you could be found in our cosmos, so we traced our own history back with altered possibilities... and found you civilisation, which housed several like you. I'm to bring you back to my universe to level out the forces upsetting it."

A galaxy opened like the first spring blossom before my eyes. A dandelion swirl of misty tendrils like hazy air beneath the first clutch of new heat after winter, but this hung in blackness, giving the luminosity an intensity like the countenance of a god! Threads of blue, red and grey wired through the mystical white, where little knots of starlight studded into the spiral of dust. The moths around those minuscule light bulbs bore life on their wings, how many planets are like my own clustered for heat around those campfires? I wondered. I flinched at convoys rushing by us left and right, past our hovering vantage, fleeing into the blackness. "They are species trying to escape the death of their universe. We attempted to get them stay, but, you were a Plan B for many," the alien told me. Where have I heard that before? I thought cynically as I watched the space exodus around me. "So where do we go from here?" I asked my companion, whose eyes, upon reappearing, had gained a wistful look, filled with the vague dust of his galaxy home. He absentmindedly extended his hand, "my planet is the first port of call." He whispered. As I clutched his hand, motion began, though it was more contained in the enlargement of the galaxy before us, extinguishing the black as it took up the entire field of vision. I looked at it's unfathomable spectacle, stomach flipping like an acrobat on speed! Am I on drugs? A part of me pleaded to know. How had I gone from waiting at a bus stop, deciding whether to board the mass transit vehicle from nowhere and ride it to nowhere else in particular, abandoning all the drudgery I knew? To watching the mass transit of species I could only imagine race by me, knowing that I was a backup plan for countless lives?

I was probably laying in a gutter somewhere, foaming at the mouth, but why not embrace this turn of events anyway? I thought as the foam of the galaxy gulped me down.

© Brad James, 2014.