His luggage was been packed meticulously, almost Zen-like, with the optimum items needed for the trip something he found extremely satisfying.
In his backpack - to be kept as cabin luggage - he had a newly acquired book. It was about the Mayan Calendar and seemed well-cosmic.
He had his mp3 player with his top-notch headphones connected. The headphones were so big that they made him look like some kind of oval Mickey Mouse, but the sound quality was crystal clear and loud enough to shut everything else out, so he didn’t care that some people stared at him when he wore them.
His laptop was fully charged, and although he wouldn’t be connected to the web in flight, he could always play a round of “Pong” or go through his notes as planned.
When he arrived at the airport he went straight to the check-in. He had come very early, so he had plenty of time.
Well through the humiliating, and in his opinion, totally unnecessary security-check, he’d picked up an overpriced sandwich and a bottle of water.
He sat down at the gate, even though his flight hadn’t even come up on the board yet. There were actually one or two flights to depart from this gate prior to his.
“No problem”, he thought.
He was on top of time, and was thoroughly enjoying it.
After setting himself up properly, he put on his oversized headphones, pressed play on track one in the optimized music library. It was in shuffle-mode, and after his clean-up he couldn’t go wrong from here.
Then he opened his laptop and accessed the free airport web courtesy of his flight number.
He checked the news and some music sites.
At one of the disco forums, where he’d just been checking out what parts of his record collection were worth before taking them to the second hand store, there was a strange thread that caught his attention.
A sequence of posts, each containing just a couple of lines of text - all contained rather cryptic messages.
The thread was called:
"Earthbound – Surfing the Apocalypse"
Which he found to be quite a funky title, although he found this to be a strange entry into a forum focussed upon disco.
As far as he was concerned, most people into that kind of music rather preferred the bright soundtrack of a carefree lifestyle rather than cryptic, sometimes dark communications from shady sources.
The absurd thing was that the string of near nonsense had a strange familiarity to it that he found inexplicable.
He didn’t bother reading it all to see what the fuss was all about, but decided to have his say anyway.
He had created a user account for the forum when he went through his records. He logged in and wrote the following reply to the thread:
“Everything is connected.”
Then he thought no more of it, and continued to circle around in the usual manner, clicking randomly, checking the same bookmarks three times, but finding nothing of interest.
Somehow, this just made him restless again.
Vix put down the laptop, drank some water, and picked up the book about the Mayans.
He’d already been through a few chapters during tea-breaks, in-between cleaning out his flat, and it was certainly fascinating and out-there reading.
After reading for a little while, he put the book down again.
He would have to change his strategy.
This didn’t work.
He picked up his laptop again, and logged into his blog.
Then he uploaded the track currently playing in his headphones.
It was "Kool Karma" by Illumination. It sounded optimistic in a subtle way, and it suited his expectations of his destination well.
Then he posted a picture of a scenic beach again – this time without any nuclear explosions in it.
It wouldn’t be appropriate at this point.
But he felt as if this post wasn’t enough.
He thought he could do better.
Now that everything had changed inside him he felt a new kind of responsibility, something he’d never felt before.
Earlier he had checked in on the site peacerael.org, as it happened to be one of his most recently added bookmarks. Not much happening there.
He opened his mail program, hit the "new message"-button, and filled in the mail-address to peacerael.org.
Then he scratched his chin for a bit, and then wrote his first ever poem:
PARADISE BOUND
We're heading down
The Cosmic drain
But that's all good
It's all ok
Cos there is no pain
On the Cosmic plane
So have no fear
We’ll soon break through
Both time and space
And in their place
We’ll all create
A secret garden
Where we’ll walk around
With a mental hard-on
For all to see
A peaceful, magic
Shit-cool
Perfect
Playing-ground
For you and me
(Vix, age unknown, and irrelevant)
Would you know it?
Vix.
Poet.
He boarded the plane.
First, he entered the wrong corridor, and got some bad looks from the business class people up front.
It didn’t bother him at all. He just worked his way through the aisle back to his own compartment. The compartment where the real people travelled.
Tourist class people.
He sat down in his seat and buckled his seatbelt.
The woman next to him smiled at him.
It made him feel comfortable.
Soon they were accelerating across the runway, and before Vix knew it, he was on his way to Okinawa.
After he had had his little meal with some half-decent tea, he pulled up his laptop and flicked through some notes in the soon-to-be-perfectly-ordered ‘ITS_JUST_LIFE’ folder.
He then sat back and listened to some tracks from his mp3 player.
The woman next to him stared at the huge headphones, showing no signs of remorse over her obvious rudeness. They were that big.
As he flipped the seat to the resting position, he let out a small sigh of relief.
Moments later, he fell asleep.
Vix was standing in a very strange room.
It was some kind of workshop, with large metal objects and rolls of copper wire stacked against one wall, and a messy desk full of big papers with strange scribblings on them.
The whole place smelled of dust and burned rubber, and the more he looked around, the more he got the feeling that he was inside a very old building. In fact, everything in here looked very old.
He sensed something was not quite right.
He felt perfectly fine, only different somehow.
There was a door to his right. He decided to go through it.
On the other side, he entered into an old-fashioned library.
There were books everywhere. All the walls had tall dark wooden shelves filled to the rim with books and stacks of documents.
Vix sat down in a large leather chair. Next to the chair was a small round table, and on top of the table was a black notebook.
He picked it up and looked inside.
There wasn’t much written in it. A couple of charcoal sketches of something he couldn’t interpret with certainty, with some ancient handwriting below.
He put it back on the table.
Then he noticed his hands.
They were not really his hands.
He looked down on his lower body, and discovered that it wasn’t his body either.
He jolted upright and started walking around the room.
This was not good, he thought. Not good at all. But what to do?
There was another door on the far wall. He decided to open it.
Behind the door was a darkened room, and in the shadows he could see a large bed, a chair, and a small table with an old Victorian washing-basin, a mug and a mirror on top.
He walked over to the table, swiftly grabbed the mirror, and returned to the door where the light shone in from inside the library.
As he lifted the mirror to his face he kept his eyes half-closed in case something had gone more wrong than he could handle at this point. After all, his life had started to un-warp these last few weeks, and the less of this otherworldly kind of shit he got himself into, the better.
As he peeped through his squinting eyelids, he could make out a man’s face. He opened them a little bit more.
Vix was sporting a dark brown moustache and dark brown hair. The surprised look of two brown eyes met his own as he opened them up wide.
Shit!
He knew this face.
It belonged to Nikola Tesla.
He slammed down the mirror, almost breaking it in the process.
“Shit!”
The last thing he needed was some kind of morphing shit going down.
What to do?
He couldn’t really afford things going all pear-shaped at this point. He decided to try and sort this out in a civilized way.
He gently lifted the mirror, and said:
“Thanks for the Pong machine.”
“You’re most welcome”, the man in the mirror answered back.
“It’s a little puzzling - meeting like this, I mean… I’ve always admired your work, but…”
Vix couldn’t find the right words.
“Not at all!” Tesla replied. “I have something to show you, something of great importance.”
“Oh…” Vix said.
Then Tesla started walking, with Vix inside.
He didn’t stop until they were standing in front of the messy desk.
“Here!” the great inventor said, and pointed at one of the drawings. “I never really put my ideas down on paper, but due to the fact that I will have to show it to you, I’ve slightly changed my routines this time.”
“Well, thanks”, Vix said.
Tesla/Vix then picked up a big rolled-up paper, and spread it out on the desktop.
“This”, the inventor said “is the key to free energy."
“Free energy?” the same mouth replied, this time at Vix’ will.
“Yes. It’s my Over Unity Machine. It transforms energy from the Earth’s magnetic field and turns it into electricity.”
“But how?” Vix could feel a major overload about to take place.
“It’s simple. Like all my inventions, like all good inventions. It simply turns one form of energy into another. Nothing of great genius, really. It just exploits a natural resource that’s already there - in abundance, and, based on the principle of a simple mobius coil, translates that resource into something that this planet never can seem to get enough of.”
“Wow!” Vix said. “Mobius what?”
“Ahh!” Tesla said, smiling, then continued: “Dear Victor, of course I don’t expect you to understand the underlying workings of my invention. I just need you to carry it with you into the future. There will be a time when the battle over energy will darken this Earth as it has never been darkened before. Man will kill and slaughter to no end to obtain access to more and more energy, and the generation of this energy will all be based on bad technologies with little efficient exploitation of the fuel it’s utilizing. Still, because there will only be a few greedy hands controlling this industry, the system will be kept afloat at all costs, and any attempts at creating alternatives will be played down, and even be directly opposed. Eventually this will lead to a great crisis with a very, very costly outcome for humanity. So, you understand that I am giving you a great task in choosing you as the courier of my blueprints for a different solution.”
Vix could feel a new panic wave building up inside, and all he wanted to do was scream “Okinawa!”
Instead, he said:
“But how on Earth am I gonna do this?” He lifted the mirror up to his face again, staring desperately into the stranger’s face.
“Easy. I’ve printed it all out on this walnut”, Tesla said in the mirror.
“Walnut?” Vix replied.
He looked down, and saw that he was now holding a walnut in his hand. At first it looked like any other walnut, but when he lifted it up to take a closer look, he could see that there were tiny words and formulas carved out all over the walnut, like one of those Guinness world record miniature bibles that had been printed on a nail’s head.
Then he looked in the mirror again, but this time Nikola Tesla had gone, and in his place a red demon with a wide grin stared back at Vix.
He screamed, the demon screamed, and the Demon/Vix almost lost the walnut with the plans for Tesla’s Over Unity Machine.
“Go away!” Vix shouted. “I am your Master.”
The red demon-face gradually morphed back into his own face, but just as he was about to feel that he got the situation back under some kind of control, he almost jumped with fear again, as his face morphed once more – this time into some sort of alien. Or more half an alien.
It had greenish skin, and one big black alien eye, but the other one was much tinier and resembled a human eye.
“I am your Master, too. Fuck off!” Vix shouted to the half man/half alien.
The face morphed back into his own.
“Good, good, good”, he nervously said to his own familiarly anemic and unhealthy reflection. “Now, let’s find a way out of here.”
He turned around, and headed for the door at the far end of the room.
Just as he reached it, he heard a terrible sound coming from behind him. A deep animal growl. A raging, deadly, savage warning of an imminent attack rang in his ears.
He turned his head in the fraction of a second, and then saw it.
A large, black gorilla came running through the corridor at the other end of the room.
He threw the door open and rushed out, then he slammed it closed and turned the key that was sitting in the lock on the other side.
He desperately looked around for something to help him solve the situation.
Then he discovered an old dusty Xerox-machine standing by the wall.
It was just what he needed.
He frantically placed the walnut on the glass surface of the copying machine and hit the ‘copy’-button.
The machine lit up and made a whirring noise as it started copying the walnut’s outer shell covered with Tesla’s construction drawings.
The banging on the door got wilder and wilder and the growls from the gorilla now hit an all time high.
He was about to accept the fact that in the next moment the giant ape would succeed in tearing the door down and go for the kill.
His kill.
Then it struck him.
This wasn’t happening!
It wasn’t happening at all!
This had already happened.
Vix woke.
Weightless.
Falling.
Then he remembered the plane he was in.
Around him there was total panic, with people of every breed and shape crying, shouting and waving their hands in the air.
Some were also praying - especially the ones that didn’t look particularly religious to start with.
This was bad.
In front of him, the open laptop still stood at the small seatback table, unmoved, as if by magic.
Vix was still buckled up in his seat.
He felt incredibly calm, and had no intention of panicking or losing his focus.
He simply pressed the button to put his seat back to the upright position, hit one key to wake the computer from hibernating, and then started typing into his still open ‘ITS_JUST_LIFE’ document.
The words and figures from his still very fresh dream had somehow fastened on his inner retinas, and he had no problem re-constructing Nikola Teslas construction drafts from the walnut/Xerox copies down to the most intimate detail.
His mind was super-clear, and he knew he was meant to do this, so it had to be done.
When he’d finished, he closed the laptop, put the table back up, and – locking his body firmly between his and the seat in front of him – lifted the seat bottom and took out the life-vest undereath.
Then he put the laptop into the empty compartment where the life-vest had been, replaced the seat bottom, and put the life-vest on.
It was a very difficult maneuver, but he still managed, cramped in the tiny space between the seats in a descending plane.
Then Vix sat down in his seat again and thoroughly buckled his seatbelt, sporting a bright yellow life-vest with a red plastic whistle attached.
And waited.
Gradually the floor in the corridor started slowly throbbing, and soon the whole metal tube of the plane cabin seemed like gently breathing.
This warbling effect stayed, very slow and comfortable, and Vix had no fear of the sensation.
A figure came walking casually along the isle towards him.
He knew this figure.
It was the Black&White man.
“So, we meet again”, The Black&White man said.
“I guess so.” Vix replied.
“How have you been?”
“I’ve been good, I guess. Just fine.”
“Splendid”, The Black&White man said and clapped his gloved hands together once.
“Say, would you care to join me for a nice little walk. I guess we could need some fresh air both of us. I don’t care much for sticking in here.”
Vix looked around him.
The cabin was now filled with smoke and screaming people. Sparks were coming out of the walls, and everything was falling apart all around them.
“Great idea!” Vix said.
There was nothing he wanted in the world other than go for a walk with the Black&White man.
“Where to?” the Black&White man asked.
“Okinawa.” Vix replied.
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