Visions

Whoever was that boy, he was certainly not from this town. If we opened earlier to talents coming from abroad, we would have claimed victory in the war. Instead, we were blindfolded by our supremacist arrogance.

When the battle ends, victory is for those who survived to tell the story; valor is the name of a commemorative medal for those who never come back.

 Now, let me tell you how I won the war.

In a world without good, only evil, the trickster came to sell us his dreams, and we bought them all; we even used our savings to help him. But when the apocalypses began, he took his family and close friends and left, without even saying thanks.

A simple walk outside the hut where the nomads held me while I recovered revealed an eschatological landscape of desolation, a place where wonders from the past were recycled to build the crude tools needed for surviving nowadays. My heart sank.

Accountability shall be enforced. 

Leaders used disarming treaties as bargain tools, betting on our world. We lost. 

The eight-year winter is about to end, and they will soon come out from their bunkers, healthy and ready.

Their judgement day is near.

“Harry is a bit rough today.” 

“Oh, that's not Harry. These guys are from a freak show in Vegas. The person who rented them to me said that they are legit; that explains the smell, I guess.”

“What?” 

“Ready for the picture…smile.”

My sense of awe was quickly replaced by terror. The colonial ship exploded, and the escape pod brought me to this desolate moon with supplies for a month. The rescue beacon is broken, and the radiation levels are high. “This is where I going to die.”

The first sentient software was received with irreverent skepticism. Then came the changes in the government's ethos; the authoritarian manners; the new order. 

We surrendered to a superior intellect.

No revolution was needed; just one click on accept.

The explosions, without the cinematographic bangs, were flashes of light striking in sequence; an Independence Day celebration. The armada was destroyed; no new territory was annexed. An era of terror has ended.

We became the sole architects of our destiny.

The park was closed, as it has been for years. I remember the giant robots of corporatize properties going around, scaring kids. We had to make a line for two hours for the privilege of a ride inside a freaky robot mouse. I can't see why people liked it so much.

We roamed this terrarium of lost dreams where we lived, seeking for a way out. The illusion of a better life awaiting us beyond the twilight was our drive. The crimson horizon was immutable, a permanent sunrise that never turned into a daylight. We thought this was the purgatory, maybe it was.

Two glimmering red gems appeared in the riparian habitat, under which they've been dormant for centuries. They crawled up the sewage pipes into the guts of the human city, executing an ancient command: learn, copy, and prepare the planet for our arrival. 

The question was posed, no one knew the answer. In time, someone came out with a revolutionary idea. The symbols represented an astronomical configuration that'll happen soon. When the time came, the device imploded in a black hole, swallowing all. It always works.

The sultry air was stale, dead, and the sun was at the perfect angle to delineate the bottom of the lake in that greenish canvas of lichen. The flying saucer sunk right here. Their underwater base must have been down there, but where? It was then when I saw it.

Oxygen levels were critical, my mind was foggy. Silence preceded darkness. 

Suddenly, I was sitting on a school bench. It was a warm spring and flowers were blossoming around me. 

I 'knew' at that moment, death wasn't the end. 

Finally, I was complete. 

Slowly waking from a dreamless sleep, I found myself looking at the stars in a foreign realm. The putrid smell of rotten animals was an omen of death. 

The tokoloshe was sitting on my chest, staring at me without eyes, breathing heavily. 

“End my life now, freak!”

Six girls and Tituba complained of being pinched and pricked with pins by an invisible entity. It was the year 1692 in the puritan village of Salem, an unfortunate time and place. 

Tituba, an enslaved South American Indian, was the first accused, perhaps due to looking different.

Tired of sumptuous banquets with individuals of dubious interests, I often seek refuge in the desert's diner outside Las Vegas where I go when I need calm. There I can hear what my mind is whispering, to pay attention, build upon my thoughts.

Three months stranded on a moon that is cold as ice and dry like my bank account after my wife left me. I'm sick of drinking my filtered urine! Who would say that I would crave a glass of water. Not vodka, just water.

Once fed the new stellar information, the ship's analytical device produced a map of uncanny quality of this region of space. Today, we found the location of an aquatic planet where cats were outcasted by a race of hairless monkeys. We'll free them.

I've seen things who mice wouldn't believe. Warships on fire falling in Aldebaran; the blind aquatic monsters of Triton; cities engulfed in radioactive fire. But I never heard of a planet where a mouse has to live in fear, hiding. I say those are Lies!

“Our treatment caresses your body with a plethora of sensuous pleasures unlike anything you could have experienced out there.” 

“Oh! What's the price?” 

“Darling: if you have to ask for the price, you cannot afford it.”

Crumbled buildings showed how fast nature had taken over after the Martians sterilized the surface. Earth's leaders worked with them in exchange for immunity and safety. We even paid for the ads' campaign with our taxes. Our resistless response was permissive.

Our shielding didn't stop the alien sirens from implanting their missive in our powerless minds. Their chant set us on course to the rufous nebula; the forbidden zone. 

Once we exhausted our power, they'll come to claim their prey.

The collector craves for exotic items shows a balance between malevolence and wit. After he found out about a planet full of semi-intelligent hominids, he paid a fortune for a life sample to add to his collection.

When you learn to balance wholeness and emptiness in the void between thoughts, you would be able to see that physical reality is a nefarious illusion intended to harness us in this existence.

“After moving here, people didn't trust my skills, so I couldn't find a job. I was at lost for a while.”

“And then?”

“I gave up caring about what they may think about me, I guess.”

“So, do you feel better?”

“I guess so. I sleep better if that counts.”

After putting the pieces together, her life became a tapestry of ironies. On one side, she was a loving mother by today standards, but on the other side, she instrumented the demise of everybody who opposed her husband.

After days moving between refugee shelters, the army dropped us at São Paulo Airport where the last flight to the safe zone was departing. But, it was too late, there was no room for us. In the monitors, the countdown is almost over. We pray for the end to be quick.

The nurse told us a fairy tale of a distant land, a place populated by humans like us, where people were born instead of being cloned. Nonsense! A perfect place doesn't exist. “Let's come back to the incubator; our turn to be nutrients is near.” I cannot wait.

People in this party behave as criminals in disguise. I just cannot trust in anybody. That ginger girl was staring at me with a wicked smile, and left the drawing room behind me. I better get out of this place before too late.

Jeremiah's granddaughter found the cave mentioned on the letters; the peril she faced would pay in multiples. Upon eating the sacred mushrooms growing there, she visualized splendid pedestals; hovering rocks of dubious makeups told her stories in silence.

That morning I saw her there, sitting defiantly, smoking as it was natural, sporting that defiant satisfaction of breaking the dogma. I grasped the idea, this was just feigned evil: she was mirroring the adults she met so far. There was hope.

Jeremiah hasn't been the same since coming from prospecting South. He kept talking about the fine foreigners he met, he read aloud quirky stories from a strange book, and his eyes turned snakelike. The village's people started calling him a quack.

I became a vegetarian because I saw this documentary in which farm animals were slaughtered bluntly, so I said, “I cannot be an accomplice of this,” but then I had a dream in which a cow said to me, “If everybody stops eating meat, we would never be born.”

We built our capital using frozen methane blocks, imitating the gloomy clouds of noble gases which sprinkled the crimson skies. We were splendid architects back then. 

It's sad to remember it after what we did to the planet. It's just sad.

In a blip, their atomized bodies returned to the universe, pure as they were when they were born, forged in the primordial furnace inside stars. Their lives remind threads of the cosmic fabric, as information cannot be destroyed.