Last call

He was walking along a narrow alley through the forest. Everywhere was vast darkness, thick, as if someone had spat out parts of the abyss. The trees were dense. The Sun had gone out. The air smelled of smoke and burnt objects. Paper? Wood? He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember anything from the previous day. Suddenly, he held a pendant in his hand. It was the only fragment of his old life that connected him to the previous reality. He remembered only the fire. After a flash, everything went out. He wondered about the pendant in his hand. It was a heart-shaped locket, like the ones that open and have two small windows and a lock. But he couldn’t see anything now, so that he could decipher it. He was just walking in the dark. He arrived in front of a gate.

It was heavy and stony. It was very high, as if it extended to the sky. It was so foggy that he couldn’t tell. He instinctively decided to knock on the gate with the rapper. There was a heavy rattling from the stone larynx and then like an echo the buzz resounded in the vast beyond. He felt he was on another planet, not on Earth. The place was eerie. As if there were no limits to the objects and it was a product of design. Like he was a hero on a play station track. The gate creaked open. Jonathan shivered from the cold air that entered his lungs. Who knows what was hidden in there? He had no choice. Wolves were heard from the forest. He decided to get in. It looked like a gate that could take him away from where he was now. But sometimes the grass is not greener on the other side. He risked it. He stepped inside and then entered through the slit. There was no time for fear. He went straight into a state of depersonalisation. As if someone else had entered his body and made his movements. He saw himself from the outside. His anxiety had exceeded normal limits. He would obviously die soon. Like in a thriller.

He couldn’t see anything. Eerie silence, fog and cold air. All the dead in the world were lying down here. He couldn’t hear anything. If something was about to attack him, he could very easily leave him dead in a second. Jonathan counted slowly from within. He decided to close his eyes for a while. The door slammed shut a second behind him, leaving him in the thick black darkness. Dust was raised. His heart shook all over. His survival instinct had been activated to the maximum.

“I collapse or I take control. Is anybody here?’’ he shouted. He closed his eyes and tried to eavesdrop. You feel better with your heart. No image came. He had no choice. He fell to his knees and began to pray. “If there is anyone out there, God, creature, entity, please answer. If it is only me, let my insides answer. I speak to all the forces within my grid in the nucleus.”

“Yes,” a dull voice was heard. “What do you want to know?” she asked him again.

“Who are you?” Jonathan turned around in terror.

“You asked me something,” the voice told him again.

“I’m losing my mind!” Jonathan screamed.

The voice petered out.

“No, no, please don’t leave,” he murmured. “You are my only hope.” He began to search with his touch, all around, terrified. He felt an earthen wall. There was a click like an activating button and immediately an arrow tore through the air, scraped through his ear and cut a piece. Jonathan fell to the ground screaming and started to cry. “Say something, you son of a bitch! Damn it, why are you doing this to me? How do I get out of here? I will die,” he said with a wince of despair.

“Do you want answers?” the voice was heard again.

“Yes, yes, please, I will not say anything negative about you again, don’t leave. Tell me where I am. What should I do?” he cried in despair.

“You are in the room left after the disaster,” the voice told him. “Here, we bring those who are in transition or those who have survived and haven’t chosen to leave completely. That is, those who have not yet decided whether they are brave or not.”

“I do not understand,” Jonathan uttered.

“Ah, you people. You are visual types.” Immediately images appeared inside the cave. “Here, you see the buildings of the area where you used to live, just as it is now. Everything has become pixels. Τhe flowers, the buildings, the people, the animals, the colours, the sun — everything has numbers on it, as you can see. They took their primitive form as beings, that is, what they have always been.”

Jonathan looked puzzled.

“You can walk in it,” the voice said. “It's a simulation.”

Jonathan walked into his neighborhood. The mini market where he used to buy his cigarettes had numbers on it like a solid square consisting of coordinates. A series of other numbers ended in a form like a leash and were joined by another series of numbers, which Jonathan concluded to be Mrs. Margi with her dog Bud, passing by each morning. “Why did this happen?” he asked the voice.

“It happened because you came very close to the truth. No being on the planet can stand the harsh truth when its consciousness is not ready for it. People say they want the truth, but who could see themselves from the outside? If a being has this ability, it is like a computer realizing that it is a computer. If you are fully aware of who you are, you are coming out of this form, which means you don’t even have to be it. It’s self-destruction. I cannot explain it better. Error 101. You see that you are made up of digits? In fact, you do not exist. Do you understand that? If one understands that he is actually a simulation, what’s the purpose? It tends to infinity. Error. 1,761,771,781.79… The sequence does not end. No one can exist alone in any form. If there is a sequence of numbers, immediately there is another pair. Basically, if the beginning of a creature takes place, it must be based somewhere. Like a matrix of creation. Do you understand me so long?”

Jonathan wanted to vomit. His stomach was turning. He loudly threw up twice, on the left.

“As you should,” the voice said.

“Who are you?” he asked it.

“Who do you want me to be? The magician. You. Fragment of your consciousness, how should I know? If you are asking whether I am the god, no, I’m not.”

“Why are you telling me all this, what the hell do you want me to do about this?” Jonathan shouted.

“You asked me, pal. I don't know if you remember. Stop acting like a drama queen. Decide what you will do. You can easily commit suicide. If you continue in this cave, you will generously find many ways of horrific and sudden death. You’ll feel nothing.”

“Do I exist?” Jonathan cried. “Am I a simulation too?”

“You’re a smart ass,” the voice said derisively.

“You’re not polite anyway,” said Jonathan. “As the voice of my conscience ,you are very stupid.”

“Oh, please,look yourself in the mirror,” said the voice sarcastically.

“Why do I still exist in this form?”

“You do not exist, you just came here voluntarily, I told you. You came very close to the truth. You can stop existing in this form at any time. The thing is, what do you want? For what reason are you here? Ask yourself!

“How the fuck should I know?” the voice yelled.

“What is this pendant?" Jonathan asked in a steel voice.

“What's left,” the voice laughed .The pendant lit up when Jonathan entered the numbers simulation. It smelled like burning and there was smoke. “Shut up,” Jonathan said suddenly to the voice. “You shut up!” he said in his thoughts. “Only I am here now.” He opened the pendant. Light came out from inside. “I want to go in,” he said. And the pendant sucked him in.

“Here is your heart, here is your secret,”a girl whispered to him in the mist, where they were now going into freefall. All around he heard screams and saw flames. They were flickering and burning. His old house, which was full of wires, had been burnt to the ground. Mrs. Marge's house, too. The dog was barking like crazy.

“Like a holy, magical, pious fire, the gloomiest element will come down and burn what is left of oblivion.It will purify us in ether-soaked material and we will die in its change,”someone was muttering.

Jonathan was out in the street, some were talking, others were praying. The sky was filled with towering fires, like dragons swallowing everything. He would like to pray too. To believe that a God would save him. But he had updated his consciousness. He didn’t believe anything outside of his own energy. Suddenly, he saw his mother’s face in a flashback,when she gave him the pedant.

“I'm leaving,” she told him in tears. “Remember where your heart is, there is your world, there is your creation, there are your people. Man is equal with heart.” And then she started running and dived from the skyscraper.

“No!!!" he shouted like a little girl. He sat down and cried. “When did this happen?” He abruptly returned to reality. Everything around him smelled of oil and burnt tires. Explosions were heard. Screams, people burning. Pieces of melting buildings and debris were falling from everywhere. Suddenly, he began to see colours and then slowly numbers appeared on the tiles. Jonathan wished he were dead. “It’s all on my mind,” he told me. “It's all in my head, it's in my head. None of this exists. I do not exist. I am nothing. A simulation. I can disappear now.” He was seated on the asphalt, muttering and chanting psalms. Suddenly, he calmed down. He broke away from the atmosphere around him. He distanced himself. He got out of his body, calmed his heartbeat and said: “I do not belong to any situation. He saw himself in all people. Like a kaleidoscope, he saw himself in another space-time killing a woman and in another being a priest and in a third digging a garden and planting vegetables. He saw himself in small pieces. A space-time continuum of his consciousness, which fell into a vortex, inside the letter Φ. “I will die in calmness.” He entered into another frequency of serenity. He sat cross-legged on the asphalt and made small sounds in a meditative state. He created a protection ball around him. He detached himself from the noises, as if he had entered a jar. He did not hear or see anything. He could only hear the waves of the sea and the pebbles he walked on. Fragments of images. He could only see the sea. He entered a thick transparent radioactive darkness. “I want to leave this place,” he wished, as if this were already real and could be done. As if it were certain. Like he was causing it. He grabbed the pendant in his palm and everything disappeared inside it. Jonathan closed his eyes and, when he opened them, he was back in the forest. He couldn’t recall even half of it. That was a flashback. “If we could remember everything,we would have gone crazy,” he thought. Someone stabbed him in the abdomen.