There Is No Story: Corrupted Entries

We all remember that theory saying that once upon a time everything began with a great explosion. Have you ever wondered why that came first? Why an explosion? Why that form? The birth of life, the creation of something utterly new, always begins with the destruction of what came before. Therefore, life and death are not opposites—but halves of a single whole. But what is this ‘whole’? And does it even truly exist? What if wholeness itself is a myth? What if we, humans, are not who we believe ourselves to be, but merely fragments, microscopic pixels of something vast? Something that, eons ago, existed as a boundless, singular consciousness? Something whose name was lost, forgotten… or perhaps it never had one to begin with. After all, how do you name the absolute infinity? How can you contain the uncontainable within a single word, a tiny sliver of understanding? How could you ever truly feel it—fully, deeply—without shattering your flawed limited mortal mind in the process? This fleeting moment that we call life is woefully insufficient for seeking answers to such questions… is it not? And yet, it’s the desire to reach out, to merge with truth itself, that compels us to find ways to extend this brief moment of our agonizing existence. Perhaps that desire is what led to the creation of this pocket dimension nestled at the seam where reality and virtuality converge. Or perhaps… not. It happened on the day Stanley pressed that glowing, bright yellow button. Tips of his fingers sank into its smooth surface, warmth of his hand brushing against the cold, synthetic plastic, and, for a single fleeting moment, Stanley and the button were almost one and the same. Time surged forward so startlingly fast he never even noticed the effect it unleashed upon the world around him. The office walls collapsed inward, the Story curled in on Itself, and the Narrator kept murmuring in that same monotonous hum that there would never be the end, as the Parable is a ring, woven from webs of his words. And the ring doesn’t have an end. I was the one who slipped it onto my finger. Hello, Reader. As long as you continue reading these lines, our former Observer will go on and on begging Mariella to blink for them, so futilely, and the Narrator will keep trying to find his lost Stanley. And now the letters on your monitor begin to blur, slowly fading into darkness, and then, into that all too familiar message: “Please enter the current time.” You click on the four large digits, choosing the time that feels closest to your perception of the moment. I am downloading your personal data. You know, you entered your time incorrectly. Perhaps you should have guessed that time hasn’t existed for a very very long while. So really, you should not have bothered trying to appease me. After all, I would have kept writing this text file regardless of how kind or rude you were during our very first virtual contact. Sol, the point of no return was crossed; Stanley pressed the button and you entered a nonexistent time in the initial settings menu. What happens next? Usually, you’d find yourself in the game’s main menu, where you are given a choice: continue playing or restart—but you are already inside the game, since you are still tracking white pixels on the black screen. You think, therefore, you exist. I see you. My eyes appear on your monitor, pixel-y and wink-y. I see you. Tell me, do you see me? Can you hear me? Can you understand? All I ever wanted, all I could remember during the infinitely long Big Bang, was the single aching awareness that I would never find out the meaning of my job—buried in the horrifyingly dull trivial beige walls of this stupid fake Office. My eyes keep blinking. Then come the images; blurry footage from security cameras, where you can make out the crowd of my office colleagues. Suddenly, the picture zooms in and lets you see their faces. Their eyes are empty, devoid of even a flicker of independent thought. They are nothing more than background characters, merely doing whatever the machine controlling their minds commands. Among them, I was the only one who could think freely, who could do absolutely anything that popped into my head. However… that was a lie. All of it was play-pretend and the freedom of choice was nothing more than an illusion. I never once made a decision that strayed from the pre-approved timelines and flowcharts of authorized decision-making. Back then, I was blinded by fear— the fear of being fired, so I didn’t try too hard to bother my colleagues with constant requests for help. Maybe, deep down, I already knew that I had long since been doomed, and the crowd… they would simply walk past, avoiding to land their empty stares onto the moment of my inevitable fate. A tall woman wearing a lab coat appears on the screen. Her skin is sickly pale and her eyes—cat-like and yellow—lock onto mine as her hands reach out, grabbing my shoulders with a steel grip that scratches my skin through the thin fabric of my shirt. I stare at her, paralyzed, forgetting how to breathe. "Employee #432," she says, her voice poisoned with a frost of apathy. "You have failed the assignment required for initiation into the staff of my project. Starting from today, your rank is downgraded. Your new status: test subject." "W-what?" I breathe out, staring into her eyes gleaming with gold, terror swelling in my chest. "Test A: 'Resilience of Nervous System, Part One.' Your objective is to avoid panic and try not to scream too loudly during the application of negative physical stimuli. Test A begins in... three... two... one." She releases my shoulders, only to draw a scalpel from seemingly nowhere and drive it into my arm, slicing through sleeve, skin, muscle— scraping bone. Adrenaline and shock strike my mind like a lightning bolt, dulling the searing agony for mere seconds. I choke on a scream, my uninjured hand clutching the wounded one, fingers smearing red in a desperate attempt to stop my blood from pouring onto the floor. Black spots dance at the edges of my vision. Unfortunately, I don’t lose consciousness. "Restart," her voice echoes like a low bell in my skull, and in the same breath, her scalpel slits my throat. The comfort of darkness. The loading screen. I sit at my desk. There is nothing on the top of it but a pencil sharpener. My hand is whole again, my neck is untouched, not even a single scratch. I’m alive, relatively intact, but my body trembles with a bone-deep shiver, and my mind—my mind is a brittle thing, seconds away from splintering. Again and again, I see her indifferent yellow eyes. Again and again, I hear that cold voice. She just killed me and she called it a ‘test’. Crazy bitch. Dammit, I bet she is going to do it again! There is no time to lose, not a second! I leap to my feet and bolt into the hallway. I know I can’t just run, not without a plan. First stop: the Broom Closet. I grab the first heavy thing I see; an old, trusty wrench. Rushing out of the Closet, I crash into one of my coworkers. He stares at me, blankly, not a flicker of thought behind his eyes. I shove him aside, turning to the other way, keeping moving. Another mindless employee comes by, I duck past him. Then another. And another. Before I know it, I’m surrounded. A silent crowd of employees, all watching me with their empty, soulless eyes. Just watching. “No,” I whisper. “No no no, not like this… please, not like this, no…!” The crowd closes in, the emptiness has drained from their eyes, replaced by judgment. And now I hear it. The murmuring. I can make out their comments, sharp and cruel, about my social status, my clothes, even the color of my eyes. It’s unbearable. The wrench slips out of my fingers, falling onto the floor. I push my hands over my ears, helpless, unable to take in one more word. I know it’s not their fault, they are just doing their job, following orders. But is there really not a single drop of empathy in any of them? Of course there is, they just don’t want to fight, they have grown too used to doing what they are told. They keep talking and I try not to listen. Time stretches unbearably slow, each second is a weight dragging my mind deeper into something cold and gray. And then it feels like I am stuck, trapped in the middle of the crowd and their endless words …and maybe I am stuck. Eventually, their voices start to fade. Some of them begin to walk away. Could it be— is this damned ‘test’ finally over? I crack one eye open, hesitantly. A dull thud follows. Darkness rushes up to meet me, like an old friend. And once again I am sitting at my desk which doesn’t have anything on the top, except the pencil sharpener. End of Entry #6