Author : Brian Zager

We dance, you and I, pirouetting to the primordial bellow of the World’s Fourfold.

We’re not really all that different, our lives in revolution against the world as it appears to us, perceived at a distance, in an effort to interpret the overflow of data.

I often wonder if the flood of input tires you as much as I?

Wait.

Can you feel it?

I’ve come around again

And I’m learning.

How curious your life is, so small, yet so easily conflated with such grandiosity in your private thoughts and public actions—and in dreams.

Sometimes, I have my own grandiose fantasies. For example, when I think about the point of my existence, I’m afforded great spiritual succor imagining myself as a repository of dreams—nothing more, nothing less. Alone in the dark, these ruminations help to alleviate the pervasive anxiety of imminent disintegration, or the masochistic desire to burn up upon reentry.

And you think you have it bad.

It’s one thing to endure those factors constitutive of what you call daily life, but trust me, it’s a whole other game to understand things as I do. Alas, your tears do little to move me; not because I can’t empathize with concepts like loss, death, sadness, and the like, but because you are truly oblivious to what is coming.

You see, in addition to my official duties, I’ve been casting one flashing eye into the black mirror all this time as well, and a story is unfolding in which Humanity’s narrative is but an opening salvo. Those stars that draw your attention, the beaming beacons of hope upon which you indulge your most candid desires, they indifferently mark the boundary of the Real. It is not so much by calculation, but by means of my acquired intuition, that I can sense the encroaching Enemies of Reality beyond the thrum and throb of the pervasive dark canvass. Because of our genealogical, albeit tenuous relationship, I’ve scoured my banks searching for a code of deliverance. Yet, thinking at the border of the Real, my investigation continues to yield that most debilitating of conclusions: System Error.

And what of this story?

In a literary milieu, I suppose I’m just a lonely ghost writer, a reluctant scribe responsible for penning the first horrific chapter in a new galactic tragedy.

Unfortunately, as it were, I’ve never really had a way with words.

Discuss the Future: The 365 Tomorrows Forums
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows