And that final button screaming to complete its destiny, to become what it had been intended to be since its manufacture… to be an object in motion.
Do you realize what you have done?
Those words haunt me, taunt me in my sleep, my every waking moment. I hear them echoing down the corridors I walk, calling to me from every alleyway I pass. I cannot get away from them. I cannot hide from them.
They encircle me and enfold me, and before them I am powerless to do more than run away, the guilt biting at my heels.
But the words have no more meaning to me than my name. No more meaning to me than the strangers faces I pass every step of the way. I am a man apart, a man forsaken, and I do not even understand why.
Do you realize what you have done?
“No,” I answer back. “How can I? I do not even know who I am.”
I know I am a haunted man. I know that the signs and wonders I could claim to do with a mere thought, in my younger days, have ceased, and that I am perhaps nothing more, now, than a cackling idiot in a rest home, awaiting my next change and turn to the sunlight.
I don’t know for sure, you see, because I think I left my sanity somewhere in the streets that are silent now, and perhaps all that I see is nothing more than mere flights of fancy in my eyes.
I see people around me as I walk these streets. These desolate avenues that carry no more commerce than the dust that flies in the wind. Dust that will be bought and sold by merchants of passion and glory that we all thought we could have been.
But no longer.
No longer can we claim to be victorious and virtuous; we’re more like vacuous and drooling, babbling to each other, those who are left, about the days gone by, and wondering if mankind will survive.
I am confused, and lost within my own mind, and I am unsure of where to walk to next. Each street that I pass by, each house an empty shell, and there seems nowhere left to go to find a breath of solace in this desiccated and fried world I have been left upon.
Perhaps I will just sit and wait for the moment of blessed release, sit and be comfortable in the shade, with my hat pulled down and cigarette in my hand, unlit, and waiting for someone to come by with a match.
Do you realize what you have done?
I cannot face what I have done, I think, because what I have done is more than I can bear.
The people I pass by... all these faces of strangers to me, how can they leer at me so accusingly? How can they claim with their voiceless blame that I am the one to do this to them? Children gather around me and throw stones.
Always I think they will be the killing blow. Always I think that this time, this time they will hit. This time they will free me from the endless stream of accusations and lies. But they always miss.
They throw the biggest they can grasp their dirty fingers around, and fling them with all their little might, but never can they hit. Isn’t that proof of my innocence? Isn’t that enough for them?
Innocence? Innocence is nothing more than a viewpoint.
Everyone is guilty of something, sometime. No one can claim they have no blame. No, not even I, who cannot even think straight. Maybe that’s the proof of my guilt?
But guilty of what?
Do you realize what you have done?
No! I do not realize, and I do not want to listen anymore!
So I walk on, I abandon my hopes of a murky shadow in a corner to hide my face, to keep me away from what has become an endless stream of wake, walk, sleep, wake..
The streets are growing dark now, and I know that night approaches. Yet another night with no answers, and a day filled with the gleeful chittering of children, mocking me as I walk.
The night brings with it its own horrors now. Now that... what? Now that things have changed in the world?
Now that the world has passed through the strange travails that beset it for so long. Now that the way of life we were always so proud of, so set to protect, and so desperate to hold on to, has gone the way of the dodo, into eternal night.
Yes, that was a bad time. I remember now, not many survived those days. They seem so long ago, and I guess they must be, given the state of decay I see around me now, but it seems such a short time ago. Seems like only yesterday, really, when I...
When I did what I did.
Do you realize what you have done?
Perhaps I do, a little. I remember, a little, that the night does seem to bring its own answers to questions I would rather be left unasked.
Nightfall, and with it comes the sound of insects, skittering out around the deserted streets. Insects grown larger because of the largess they have found in the corpses that have been left behind, corpses left to lie unburied, unknown, and unmourned.
How many? An amazing amount, given the way the world passed through its trouble, given the way that I saw it all happen from that control room so long ago.
Voices, voices calling out the orders, calling out the time and levels and strange symbolism grasped in the mathematics that were required to push us away from that horror that awaited us.
Voices calling out for the buttons to be pushed, the levels to rise, the power to flow, and then, the final button, the final solution intended to save us all from the fate that we had been sealed with.
The last hope. The last clarion call of heroics and the indomitable will of the human spirit.
And that final button, laying under my hands, ready to be pressed, begging for the pressure of my hand to complete its destiny, to become what it had been intended to be since its manufacture…
To be an object in motion.
Much like this world that I now stand upon. This world of terrible agony and deep sorrow. And regret, yes. Great regret at the fact that we had no choice, and in the end? That it made no difference whatsoever to the fate of mankind.
Yes, the night brings answers with it, as I look into the sky and see nothing but blackness. No stars twinkling in their beautiful mystery, no more guiding lights to bring the sailors home. No more light of the moon to make lovers weep. No more lovers.
And the voices, calling from the chambers of the earth, calling from the valleys and hills, crying out in agony, calling out in one loud voice to me, saying, Do you realize what you have done? But they do not know, nor will they ever, in their sad and untimely change of bodies, in their endless scream, that I had no choice in what I did.
Yes, I remember it clearly now. As clear as the black night that has come across me once again, on this walk of mine.
The dark star. The black death that was edging its way closer and closer to us, and assuring the destruction of all of us, the instantaneous burst of desolation that was sure to happen. It had come as a shock to us all, those of us who were in the know, as we used to claim. Those who had a stake and a chance to perhaps save us one more time, from the unknown.
They called me in, they briefed me on what was to come, showed the trajectory of that black death coming to us, and I saw in only a moments time that it would not miss. That it was going to happen, and that there would be nothing we could do to make it go away. Nothing we could do to make it shift into another path, and save us all.
Still... there was a chance. There always is a chance, when the human spirit is involved. When that monstrous and powerful will is put to the task of ensuring its survival.
And so, the plan.
The plan. What a mighty and horrific word that could be, a blessing and a curse at the same time, when it is placed in the hands of the good and the bad. Which were we, I wonder? Which would the infinite deem us worthy of? A place among those who valiantly tried, or those fools who did not listen to reason?
A little of both, I think. A little of both was in us all on that day in that brightly lit, endlessly loud, control room. The voices calling out, screaming orders, shouting percentages and figures and one voice calling above them all, one voice calling out…
Do you realize what you have done?
… that there was a problem, and to stop the countdown, stop the countdown, stop the...
But that mechanical part, that wonderful machine that was my body, already moving forward, already pressing ahead in its motion to complete its destiny, to do what it had been born to do, to move. The button underneath had no chance. It was mashed into itself, pressed into itself, turned into that position that would make it all come to life.
Come to life. Go to death.
No difference, in the end. No change in status, no deliverance from the darkness. Just a flash of light, and the voices calling out and calling out and calling out, echoing throughout my brain, What have you done?
Answers to questions better left unasked come in the night, indeed, and I know that I am helpless before the onslaught of memory and dream, memory and reality, and memory and what is now the broken remains of this endlessly desolate, destroyed planet of ours.
Did we shift?
Did we sidestep into that separate reality, the way we thought we would? The way the insane amount of mathematics and physics showed that we should? Did we avert one disaster, only to cause another?
The answer to that is simple.
Simple, because I simply have to look up, to find that question blatantly answered, loud and clear. Yes, a shift did happen. But to where we thought we would end up? No, to another, perhaps one or two steps away.
So tiny in the sight of man, so small on the scale of what we had accomplished over the millennia we had been around. And yet, large enough by far on the quantum scale to send us far, far, into a reality that should not be.
How many days have I wandered, now? How many times have I walked these streets, the faces surrounding me, the ghosts of what we had been, what we were, and what we were to become, all of them at once calling out to me, blaming me, accusing me of my heinous crime against them all.
I am a guilty man, marked with the blood of an entire species. No. More than that. Of an entire planet. All life, everything changed in that one moment, that one infinitely long second, when that simple finger of a man created it all.
Ghosts… Voices…
Do you realize what you have done?
Yes. In the end I do know what I have done. Perhaps tomorrow, with the light of day, I can forget.
Even for a moment. An infinite moment, finger in the air above the button. When one man created it all.
I know what I have done.
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Fantastic writing and the associated image makes for a really amazing story! 🥰👍🏻