The Experiment

"After three million years of darkness T.M.A.-1 had greeted the lunar dawn."

~~ Arthur C. Clarke, "2001 A Space Odyssey"

**********

She stood at the kitchen sink, her muscles tense and rigid, pretending to do the dishes. Resolutely, with her back to him, she reached for the bottle of cleaning liquid. There was a distinct sense of unease in the pit of her stomach that just would not go away, like a knot, a mass of tangled wires, tightening around her bowels. Try as she might to ignore it, she could feel her husband's - no, not husband, that thing's (...for whatever that was, that had appeared out of nowhere, and was sitting at her kitchen table, it was not her husband...impossible...) unblinking eyes on her back, riveted, almost piercing her through and through.

A tiny pellet of nausea emerging from somewhere near the solar plexus, the size of a peanut, began to grow larger and higher, became a wave, threatening to engulf her entire being and then she could bear it no longer.

Wheeling around to face him, she blurted out,

"More coffee?"

**********

It happened on Friday, the 13th of July 2035.

The night of the explosion, one half of the planet watched spellbound as the clear black night sky turned a blinding white and then green, and finally, purple. It seemed as if the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis had, by some geophysical miracle, traversed vast latitudes and merged the North Pole with the South.

The other hemisphere saw the overhead sun turn into a black hole blotting out the sky, plunging the brilliant day into the heart of a moonless night. Even the stars peeped down blearily, as if woken up from a horrific liquor fumed dream, and hung-over, to boot.

Media reports and the scientific community were calling it an 'explosion' for want of a better word, although there was very little sound heard, despite the aerial display. There was something though. Around the planet, people indoors and out, were overwhelmed by an extremely high-pitched noise, like an eerie radio-frequency pulse. It seemed to emanate from within their bodies, the ground and the sky, and was reverberating through every other object in sight: buildings, trees, utility poles, virtually everything. It stopped in a few minutes but left people's ears ringing for a very long time.

For days after the incident, hospitals and clinics saw a huge influx of patients with symptoms of lost time, memory lapses and unexplained injuries, and lesions on various parts of the body. None of them seemed to have any recollection of when or how those injuries occurred.

Reports poured in of people in perfect health collapsing in the middle of their daily routine. Most of them died on the spot, and those who were rushed to the hospital were declared dead on arrival. It was the autopsy reports, however, that left medical experts speechless.

In almost all cases, death was caused by a major internal organ failure: heart, kidneys, lungs, liver. To be precise, the organ in question was simply crushed to a pulp leaving the rest of the body intact. Death was instantaneous.

 

Within a week of the explosion, at least a million lives were lost around the planet. Fueled by mindless panic and ignorance, public protests and media uproar rose to a deafening pitch. Governments toppled; political heads rolled. Daily life came to a grinding halt. Pandemonium reigned supreme.

And then, on the tenth day after the explosion it stopped. As suddenly as it had begun. The mysterious deaths, the nosebleeds, the memory loss. All of it.

People began to contemplate picking up the pieces of their lives and moving on. Healing was a long way off, but the initial tsunami of terror and uncertainty began to subside gradually. It seemed the planet was coming back up on its feet slowly.

Little did they know what lay in wait.

**********

He sat preternaturally still at the kitchen table, the remnants of a practically untouched breakfast lying before him - soggy toast; a coffee stain slowly spreading on the red-and-white chequered placemat - a growing patch of brown. Yesterday's sunflowers, wilting in the vase on the counter, reflected the dull morning light filtering in through the windowpanes. Yesterday, when things were relatively normal, as in ominous-calm-after-a-tempest normal.

He could literally see through her. She was standing at the kitchen sink with her back to him, doing the dishes. He didn't know how it was possible, but she appeared to be made of glass, completely transparent, and he could see her innards clearly, through her pale lemon-colored chiffon blouse and shimmering sea green skirt.

As if in slow motion, his forearm rose from his elbow resting on the edge of the table. The palm faced upwards, his fingers aligning themselves with her spine. He raised it slightly higher pointing at the exact spot where her heart was, behind her sternum, in between her lungs. He could see it palpitating, her lungs throbbing, pumping blood and adrenaline furiously through blue and red veins and arteries and fine capillaries all over her body. In fact, he could see every organ working in overdrive, vibrating with fear. He could hear it shaking her like a dog rattling a bone, although she stood rigidly holding on to the edge of the sink.

The cancer, embedded deep inside the intricate alveolar tissues, pipes and tubes of her right lung, whispered to him. He could hear the malignant lump growing, in his head. That was all he could hear because, his mind, for all practical purposes, was dead, a complete blank.

He twisted his wrist slightly, curling all fingers together in a squeezing motion into a tight fist -

She spun around.

"More coffee?"

Her mouth formed the words, but they sounded wildly inappropriate; ridiculous even.

In fact, her head was spinning, and her heart was racing. An icy fear paralyzed her limbs, while her thoughts were in a whirl running into each other incoherently, trying to grapple with the reality staring at her.

 

He could hear her thoughts too, verging on hysteria, in his own head – "Is this real? Paul? He looks like Paul...that's preposterous...Paul's buried at the parish cemetery... ten years ago..this very day.. 27th July.. or was it 28th?? why can't I remember? Should I call the police? Am I crazy? Were his eyes blue? Or green? WHY can't I remember, goddammit…?"

And just like that, her brain shut itself down abruptly. Her lungs imploding inside her chest like a crushed paper bag, her heart collapsed as she embarked on her swift, terrifying journey to death.

He watched her body slowly crumpling up, sliding down to the floor, eyes staring up at the ceiling, blood trickling out of her mouth, ears and nose, slowly forming a crimson pool around her. He waited a minute to ensure that it was over.

Then, in slow, measured steps, as if feeling his way carefully through an alien, contorted space, he walked out the front door.

**********

Approximately fifteen hundred light-years from Gaia (third planet in orbit around Sol, the yellow-orange star at the center of the planet system in the region of the Orion-Cygnus spiral arm of the Milky Way) on a planet tucked away in the shadowy pink region behind the Horsehead Nebula, there was a flurry of activity as the Intelligences were planning the third phase of their cosmological tests, the 'Cosmic Operations', as they were officially designated. The Cosmic Operations formed one of the many core components of this top priority project, the ultimate goal and final deliverable of which was to formulate a 'Grand Unified Vision' of the Universe.

The First Phase had begun more than three billion Gaian years ago, when the Intelligences had detected the first indications of carbon-based life forms emerging from the vast primordial organic soup occupying three quarters of the planet's surface.

Finding another planet to entangle with Gaia completely, from the quantum to the macro level, was a challenge; but FK-452b in the Cygnus constellation was a good choice. It was around fourteen hundred light years away from Gaia. Apart from its position in the galaxy that favored a close observation, it was very similar to Gaia in a lot of ways. It could very well be an older cousin of Gaia.

The Intelligences took special care to prepare both planets before the process of quantum entanglement was triggered. It was a delicate and complex operation, and required the Intelligences to push their skills, and their most sophisticated high-energy matter-antimatter colliders, to their utmost limits.

Over the next few billion years the Intelligences had monitored the origin and development of life on both planets - parallel worlds mirroring each other - with mingled satisfaction and amazement. In particular, the last sixty-five million years had been unexpectedly rewarding. They found the progress of the basal primate species to highly developed creatures capable of building entire civilizations especially wonderful. With equal admiration they lauded the erection of the pyramids on the plateau of Giza and the nuclear holocaust, the definition of zero and the destruction of the Twin Towers, the discovery of fire and the launching of artificial objects into outer space using jet propulsion principles.

But most of all they loved the magical invention that connected billions of electronic devices on each planet, that was affectionately called the 'Internet'.

"Truly, what a piece of work is a Man!" they whispered collectively, lost in awe and self-congratulation at their own genius.

So delighted were they, that an occasional nudge to expedite the evolutionary process, at critical junctures in the history on both planets, was never off the table.

Then came the Second Phase. Sol, the star around which Gaia revolved, went full blast into a gigantic Supernova. It was a glorious celestial event and the Intelligences watched, entranced by the beauty of their handiwork. They observed as Gaia evaporated away into nothingness and diligently tabulated the minutest details of the corresponding changes in FK-452b.

Most of the results matched the expectations of the Intelligences. That the obliteration of life on one planet would be mirrored by the return of the dead to life on the other, was one of their major hypotheses.

There was no doubt that the experiment was a huge, resounding success. A celebration was in order. Thus, all the Intelligences were gathered in the splendid Crystal Hall of the Principal Scientific Unit suspended on the highest point of the planet. The entire Hall pulsated with the combined luminescent presence of all the Intelligences.

And they spoke with One Voice, to be heard by All.

"Congratulations to all of Us! Praise be to the Intelligences! Today, we have truly scaled new heights in scientific research! Thanks to the tireless efforts of One Intelligence and All Intelligences, working equally, always and forever, we have broken fresh ground, opened new horizons, and are hopefully one step closer to the construction of the Grand Unified Vision!

Sadly, the lovely planet Gaia had to be destroyed in the course of our experiments, but it was for a great cause!

As we all know, during the Second Phase of our tests we observed one new phenomenon - the power of the Dead over the Living. Till date, the powers we have noted are telekinetic in nature, and they work on the bodies of the Living. Given the current state of their understanding of the workings of Nature, the inhabitants of both Gaia and FK-452b need at least a million more years to master telekinesis. Which makes this new development all the more intriguing. We do not understand it fully yet, but our conjecture is that it is an unexpected side effect of pi meson decay during the Entanglement Phase. The effects appear detrimental to life, to say the least. We must perform further tests to determine if there are other applications of the said powers.

We hereby announce the Third Phase of our Cosmic Operations, wherein we, the Intelligences, shall study the full ramifications of the powers of the Dead on the Living, with special emphasis on the minds of the latter.

Good luck to us ALL!!"