So there I am, ready and everything, all packed up and cheerfully waving good-bye to my old house. The house I was born in. It is now totally abandoned. No tenants, no kids with bicycles on the street, no wives on the balconies chatting with each other.
My backpack is ready and full with supplies. Three packs of cigarettes, a box of safety matches, some instant coffee and a bar of chocolate for those rare hypoglycemia moments, where you'd kill for a little sugar. Food, I have no use for. What good did it do me? In exchange for those delightful munching moments I acquired tons of useless fat around my waist.
Walking down the abandoned street, I hear the voices prompting: "Come home, I. Never mind all that. Just come home..."
So, I head for "home".
The plane passengers are all quiet. As if they don't really exist. The plane itself is quiet. It may not even be a plane. Trying to look out the window only reveals more unneeded void. Blue void. Not black, blue. The blue void is much more scary than the black one, because in it, there is inherent the notion of orientation. See, there is the light, too. Inside black void, there is no reference point. Inside the blue void there IS a reference point, but it is so far away, so unreachable and it makes you want to paint the scenery using your colors. Not the existent blue ones.
"Never mind the blue void. Just come home..."
After 12 hours of flying, we finally arrive. Where? I don't know. The plane lands, and after 16 minutes we are ready to walk down and enter what seems to be the reception area of an airport. All the passengers are gone. There weren't really any passengers. They were imaginary companions, that were placed there so I would not feel alone. Walking towards the entrance, I see all those familiar faces. All the people in the reception area, from afar, seem familiar somehow. My dad is there, mom, my sister who was never born but was miscarried during the 7th month, my past lovers, and many familiar faces that showed up during my past, either as friend or foe.
"What the..?" What are all of you doing here?"
What is this little prick who almost beat me outside Notre Dame, when we visited France is doing with them? And dad is dead. That can not be him! And this jerk from the Chemistry department who could not answer a simple question about a Perkin-Elmer spectrograph. And Frosso? She is supposed to be married or something. She shouldn't be waiting for me. And aunt Eleftheria? She died years ago. That doesn't look like home, somehow...And this pregnant woman, over there. I don't know her. What is she doing, waiting for me. I have never met her before.
"Oh, but this IS home, I. Come, come to us!"
Friend or foe, all are smiling and waving their hands at me with delight.
"Was your trip a good one? Did you have a good time?..."
At this point, just 50 feet before I actually get close enough to greet them personally, an irrational fear overwhelms me. I feel this strange tug in my chest, as if my soul is being pulled towards the pregnant woman. Surprisingly enough, she starts being in labor pain.
"Hurry up!, we can't afford to miss another chance. Come to us!..."
Brother, this is not reassuring at all. And why is suddenly everyone friendly? And why is everyone holding baby toys in their hands and waves them to me? I am not a baby!
The woman who is pregnant appears to be an old acquaintance of mine, from high school, the first girl that I ever fell in love with. But it's been so many years. I wouldn't recognize her if I saw her now...
I am now at 20 feet from the company and still walking towards them.
"Yea! he is gonna make it! Get ready folks!....At last!"
At 15 feet, when the tug gets very intense, I notice something like a rapture, on top of the company of people. It is as if the scenery above their heads, gets torn, and behind it a strange and unfamiliar environment shows up. From within the rapture slit, I notice "something" looking at me with increased curiosity. It, somehow does not look human. When it becomes aware of my observation, it closes the slit immediately, and transforms into my mom:
"Johnny, hurry up, we don't have much time. This IS home. Don't let your distorted perceptions delude you about it."
My doubts momentarily dissolve, and I make one more step towards the group.
"Ata boy, I.! Welcome to the group! At last..."
A small voice in the back of my mind:
"This is not your home, I. Don't go closer. I am the one you love..."
As soon as the faint voice finishes, the scenery raptures completely to reveal a group of approximately 35 entities around what appears to be two surgical tables. On one of the tables, laid, is an average 56 year old man, with gray hair, sustained through tubes and intravenous systems. On the other table, a pregnant woman, in pain, having 7 large needle like tubes connecting her belly internals to the old man's brain. Half of the man's brain is exposed, to allow for a better interface between it and the woman's internals, whatever those are.
"Inject more morphine..."
"We are at 16 ccs/hour already!"
"He is waking up again. Up it up to 20ccs. NOW!!"
"One of the helper beings prepares a glass syringe, and injects 4 additional ccs into one of the plastic intravenous tubes that go to the old man's brain."
The rapture momentarily closes. The strange company suddenly transforms to the regular airport company they were when I arrived.
"You have to trust us! Otherwise this will not work. You have to trust us, I...Just come close and see for yourself. We ARE real. Here, you can touch us, if you want..."
As I reach a distance of 10 feet, I pause in front of them.
"Show me what's behind. Otherwise I won't come any closer."
"It doesn't really matter, I. What matters is YOU. We care for you and we want to make this work. Seeing what's behind the scenes will not help you, at all. Rather, it will scare you away."
"You bet your silly ass it will scare me away. What is this old man and the woman doing on those tables? And who the fuck are you?"
"We are the ministers responsible for your transfer".
"What kind of "ministers"? And what transfer are you talking about? I don't want to be "transferred" anywhere. I just want to go home!"
"Well, there are many "homes". The rapture scene is one of them. But you don't want to go to this home, do you?"
"No, I certainly don't. Who is the old man?"
"It is you, in your later years, ready to die."
"And the woman?"
"She is "the chosen one". She is the one you "chose"."
"I haven't chosen anybody, and you better tell me the truth, or I am outta here!"
"Things are very complicated I., and to attempt an explanation would only confuse you more."
"Try me"
"See, for whatever reason, you chose to believe that at age 56, you'd die. So somehow, this belief, prompted you to shoot yourself in the head, on September 2nd of the year 2020. We have managed to sustain some of the vital functions till now, but you MUST as soon as possible transfer your consciousness into another body. This old body that you saw, is severely damaged, and cannot stand the pressure much longer. If you do not go on with the transfer, the system will reverse itself, and we will have to go through a major sleep cycle. The only way to remanifest after a major sleep cycle is to recreate all this from scratch again. Do you understand?"
"Yes I do. But whoever gave you the idea that my consciousness should continue?"
"You yourself left a suicide note next to your computer, stating that you wish to come back at some later time, after 14,000 years. In fact, we have arranged for the time leap to be exactly this long. From the minute we disconnect the old man's body to the actual birth of the baby, there will be exactly 14,000 years."
"So this is actually year 2020, sometime after the 2nd of September?"
"Yes. It is the 15th of September of year 2020.You shot yourself 13 days ago. You are in this bed and you are dreaming, under heavy sedation. We have found a woman to your specifications who happened to be pregnant at the time of your suicide, and is willing to go through with this transfer."
"What are my options?"
"This transfer, or plain non-existence. However, if you choose non-existence, it will be disastrous. The system will have to be redesigned from scratch. We will all vanish along with your consciousness and return to "The One". Then, "The One" will recreate everything again, by varying slightly the parameters. It would be, as if you never existed. As if WE never existed.."
"But you always seem to know who you and me are, no?"
"That's because we are essentially an illusion. And this illusion always exists inside your mind, in which ever universe gets created. Half of your lifetime gets spent in ignorance, half with the knowledge of who you are. You have designed it to be that way, before time immemorial. You have instilled this directive in all possible parallel Universes, so no matter which one you are in, at some point you will understand."
At this point one last thing became clearer than ever. That I could change any parameter I wanted. So I picked the simplest one:
To imagine that I am writing all this on a Macintosh Performa 5200, on the 9th of July of the year 1999, 20 years prior to my suicide, not having made up my mind on whether I actually want or not to commit suicide.
This, is the eternal cycle. It all depends on a simple, probabilistic, coin toss, during the night of the 2nd of September of 2020.
That coin, the coin that I toss on that night, seems to always defy the laws of probability and to always come up as a "1". So "the probability of collapse", otherwise known as "Hubble's constant", has been predicted correctly.