The Vision

(a very short story)

Lantham sat as still as a stone, his soul tapped. Reaching across the space between dimensions, his perception was far gone. It was flying through open panoramas of unfamiliar star systems and worlds across the infinite and ever multiplying planes of the cosmos. His sight traveled billions of times faster than light, immaterial as it slipped through the intersections between planes, skating across realities that blinded and deafened him with incomprehensible amounts of information.

In a second’s pass on an alien planet, a million voices carried. A million lives lived and perished before him, each dying in their own way, by their own choices or flaws, of old age, of untimely tragedy, of inane cruelty, and of grave mistake. But these things did not sadden him. Not as they might have when he lived as they did. He lived in a way that he felt content to call his own, but at the same time, all that he witnessed struck him to be entirely familiar.

It was a common nostalgia, a remembrance that all who Lantham knew shared. It was like watching his daughter grow up all over again, only if he’d done so at a distance. There was so much he wanted to say and so much he wished he could do, but he could only watch as millions rose and fell through the vicissitudes and vagaries of hard-earned lives; the kinds of lives that demanded they be fought for. The kinds of lives that demanded maintenance and care, that demanded connection and protection. He watched it all through a lens of hyper-accelerated time. Then, Lantham felt his heart stop.

Everything before him distorted in a single chilling pulsation. Images of the burgeoning world were unresolving, drowning in the static that had begun to numb his perception. At the very same moment, a crawling tide of red and gray swept over the planet. Cities, forests, oceans; all things were buried in a downpour of flame and ash. What had taken the planet billions of years to form was washed away in seconds. Lantham could only choke on the fading pages of the moment, forced to bear witness to the loss of all of the world’s life at once. And then, like a leaf plucked from a branch, he was separated from it.

As if reality were a mere program to terminate with the flip of a switch, the moment his astral projection lost contact with the plane, all things vanished at once. He’d only ever heard about what it was like to get pulled deeper into the void, this was the first time he’d ever experienced it for himself. Everything was imperceptible. Everything except the understanding that it wasn’t nothingness at all. He’d learned as much as he could of the void during his relative time within the Archives of the Orrery, but nothing could have prepared him for the sensation of staring primordial chaos in the face. It was something as evident as entropy in the cosmos, something as simple to understand as the end of a beginning. It was something he had always known, but never fully accepted.

With a gasp, Lantham opened his eyes.