Black was as black as it previously had been. The
walls were their usual cocooning self. The sickening temporary glisten had all
but worn out, leaving the world draped in its usual dimness. Aseem was
mortified with utter perplexity. Questions popped up in his mind in billions,
and he only barely managed to un-think them before the Arbitron could catch a whiff
of something being amiss. His fingers trembled and his red eyes welled up with
tears of alienation and severe misgiving. Here he was, right from infancy and
childhood to adulthood, passing through each phase of the EPUU-ian life cycle
entirely without incidence - until today. Everything seemed grotesque,
nightmarish, off-centre, plain damn creepy. It was as if he was stuck in an
endless bad dream, going over a single excruciating day over and over again.
The memories of earlier that day had turned dim and
distant, and he had to strain hard to think back to how he had been brutishly
fooled by the Arbitron to commit sin, and had been suitably flogged as
punishment. All was justified in the natural order of the world as prescribed
by the Unnamed, he repeated to himself in consolation. Maybe this sudden shock
of brightness had also been an endurance test of some sort, a means to check
his durability in times of hardship. His chain of thoughts was interrupted by a
timely Arbitronic announcement:
“Thou have successfully passed thy First Surprise Franticness Examination, maintaining
commendable control over thine thoughts and exhibiting a sound sense of alarm
in the hour of (simulated) crisis. Similar toeing of the EPUU-ian line in
future shall lead thee to the fruits of Eternal Bliss, after thou are freed of
the mortal coil and the distractions of worldly indulgences. Peace be upon thee
and the Holy Unnamed.”
Fade to silence.
He stood rooted for a minute, assimilating the
symphony of absolute silence that evoked a flood of imaginary acoustic inputs
in his mind; screechy, cacophonic, jarring, overwhelming sounds. The embalming
effect of Arbitron’s announcement had lent a perceptible stillness to his
surroundings, a stillness that carried the sweet aroma of normalcy. The effects
were therapeutic.
His internal anxiety wafted away, blending with the
calm outside. His muscles eased, his eyes opened to their full extent (for the
first time in hours), and he felt relatively at ease. There was still, however,
a part of him that dreaded any more unpleasant experiences to befall him. His
rejoice was, hence, duly restrained and his eyeballs scurried up and down the
entire length of the world, looking out for any aberrant visual stimuli. Life
was better now, but he wasn’t keen on counting his eggs before they hatched.
Maybe he was right in doing so, because any amount
of preparation could not have muffled his explosion of emotions at what
transpired next.
Many things happened, all at once: a sizeable chunk
of the wall to his left exploded, accompanied by a blast so awfully
earsplitting that Aseem toppled over to the ground right ear-first. In a fit of
absolute incredulity, he closed his eyes and huddled on the ground in an
infantile self-hug. A pungent smell hit his nose, the very smell of hostility
and alienation. If he’d have the heart
to open his eyes and look around, he’d see rubble lying around in a heap, and
smoke billowing from where-was-once-the-left-wall-of-the-world.
A gazillion thoughts scampered in his mind in the
timeframe of a split second. It all made perfect sense. The rapture had been clarioned
by the EPUU as the last straw for the correction of an over-sinning mortal. It
had lingered over Aseem like the sword of Damocles, and today the final
frontier of Unnamed’s tolerance had been breached for good. The 666th
Verse talked of it with justified pomposity:
“Whenever
doth an errant mortal like thee commiteth himself to excessive sin, not to be corrected
by any Arbitronic hook or crook, I must, in person, strike upon the creation
with severe vengeance, level it down to ruins and start afresh with humanity.
Those that tarnish my name and anoint it with the muck of their hearts deserve
no less than my most furious ire, and shall forever be captivated in the
deepest, brightest of Hell’s rungs…”
It was all over, the world was breaking down; the
walls were being razed to the ground, collapsing on themselves. His lips
trembled to make hurried, stuttered invocations:
“O
GREAT UNNAMED, FORGIVE YOUR FAITHFUL ONE! O EXALTED THEE, MY HEARTIEST
IMPLORATIONS TO YOU, SALVAGE ME FROM THE BRIGHT UNKNOWNS OF HELL AND THE
OUTSIDE! I, WHO HAS REMAINED YOURS FOR THE LIFE, YOURS TO BEGIN WITH AND RETURN
TO…”
His mad, deplorable chants were interjected by a
much louder, stronger voice; the only voice that had ever fallen on Aseem’s
ears except his own and Arbitron’s.
“OPEN YOUR EYES, COMRADE!” It boomed over
everything else. “Open up now, be the human you were born to be.”
“I think he’s in shock, sir,” said another alien
voice, shriller and higher than the previous. “May I?”
Aseem lay heaped where he was, mortified by things
beyond his imagination. He was surely hallucinating now. A pair of feet
shuffled across the besieged world, making their way towards him. He whimpered
and scowled at the fear of whatever walked to him, clamping shut his eyes to
the maximum degree. The boot-steps grew louder in their approach, and instincts
made him cover his torso with his hands. “Get away fro me!” he feebly managed.
The high-pitched voice spoke from very close by,
“Fear not, comrade. We’re on the same side. You’re free of your captivity. We
have salvaged you from the fucking I-don’t-know-whats, but only just. You need to come with us, and pronto, we do
not have much time!”
“Wh-who…what are you? Y-you all?”
He heard the footfall very near him, and shirked
back violently when he felt a cold touch on his eyelid. He jerked it off madly
and went into a spasm of violent acrobatics.
“WE ARE HELPING YOU, COMRADE! Comply for God’s
sake!” growled the voice from afar.
He knew very less of what happened immediately
after that. He could feel two pairs of hands struggling to keep him pinned to
the ground and make him open his eyes. Their touch felt oddly human, as did
their voices and gaits. When finding it helpless to struggle anymore, he resigned
himself from all motion, repeating the incantations to the Unnamed in his mind
over and over. The alien duo lifted him off the floor and made him sit up,
propped against the common corner of two walls. His hands and ankles were bound
by a thick, coarse wire or string.
What he saw when his eyes were forced open was a
first: fellow humans. The room was unnaturally lighted, probably from the
bright outside of the world, peeping in from the hole in the left wall. The two
faces that looked upon him were ashen and worn out. They were wearing identical
ragged, soiled black jackets and a tight black lower garment to match. They
also wielded a sleek black metal contraption each, what looked to him to be
some sort of weapon. Their hands clasped the posterior end and index fingers
curled around a trigger. Their eyes were twinkling with an odd glow and lips
curled upward in a faint smile. Aseem felt threatened but did not close his
eyes again, more out of fear than anything else. One of them had a slightly odd
look to him, so much so that it scarcely could be called a ‘him’. Its hair was
longer than usual and tied in a thick bun at the back of the head. It had two
uncanny bulges where its chest should have been, a different body posture than
its partner and a strangely erotic look about it.
“Sorry for the bad treatment, but we had to do it.
We’re here to take you away, out of this confinement. You gotta come with us”
it spoke in its high-pitched voice, while the man at the back looked on with
impatience.
“Who-who are you? What the fuck is go-going on?”
“We’re humans, just like you. I’m Sanskriti, he’s Shimit.”
It extended its hand forward. Aseem ignored it. It retracted it.
“Look here: you have been in captivity here for
more than two decades, since you were born,” it went on, “We are one of the
last remnants of the only human resistance on the planet. Our race was taken
over by The Evolved Ones about 30 years ago. We’re a fringe military outfit,
fighting back against their superior weaponry and mind control. They took away
our children to experiment on us, know us better, study our behavior, make
fluffy pets out of us, hold us on a fuckin leash for all I know.” It gasped for
breath, its face full of emotion and redness.
Aseem remained silent, deadpan. All of this was
gibberish to him.
The other man spoke up. “Long story short, you’re
one of those they’re experimenting on. They’ve manipulated your mind to test
their hypotheses on how the human body reacts to shit. Our hackers been
intercepting with their mainframe for a few hours, trying to get to all of the
prisoners down here. We even managed to flash our Human Resistance Manifesto in
these cells for a few minutes, you might have read it.”
Memories of the walls turning blinding bright came
back to Aseem, making him shudder.
“The marking on the outside of your door reads
‘Religion Specimen #12: Aseem’. They’ve been fucking with you all this while,
man, taking you away from the one true God, inventing their bullshit around
your life. I know coz I’m a survivor of this fuckery, I was once in one of
these shells, running around in circle like mice, reacting to base, carnal
desires. I came out of it, the hard way…”
He stopped and sighed a long sigh, putting his palm
on his forehead, as if stifling a bad memory. He was shaken back into sudden
alarm by a sudden blast outside the room.
“WE’RE WASTING TIME WITH YOU, COME WITH US OR DIE
HERE!” barked the man, gesturing his partner to get up and get going. Suddenly
their actions seemed tense, alert, vigil. They shuffled around impatiently
waiting for a word from Aseem.
Aseem had nothing to say. He felt comfortably numb
and distant, eyes unfocussed and ear latent to the sudden sounds erupting near
him. He felt nothing, registered nothing.
“Die, you fool! We’re outta here!” said the man,
and started making his way out of the box with its fellow human in long,
measured strides. They seemed to stop short in their tracks all of a sudden,
and a thick screen of faint-green smoke ascended from the ground with a hiss.
Aseem felt dizzy and his head felt heavy. Unable to keep his eyes open, he
relaxed them and lolled his head to the side
The last thing he remembered before collapsing to
the ground were two dull thuds around him, and one of the humans’ eyes fixated
upon him, ajar with terror of the highest order.
Then, nothing.
---
