pratinu

“Scorsese, copy this, Charlie on the lead. following the lead. where is the team delta? Do you hear me? where is team delta?”

“Scorsese here. copy that. delta troop destroyed. delta troop destroyed.”

“what do you mean, destroyed? hello Scorsese, where is Rosa?”

“lost. she is lost. no contact through the CDR, nothing from the scope of TTP. will report as soon as I find a lead?”

“where was her shuttle last seen?”

“The coordinates were not recorded in the system. but the gravitational field was recorded high. the space-time was distorted before the disappearance.”

all the voices faded inside rosa’s head after she opens her eyes. her surroundings were a blur until she heard something fall on the ground. the vibrations were easy to comply with. she finds herself in the hospital without anyone in the room. the vibration spread long through the atmosphere. the doctors and nurses ran inside to help her. she sprang on the mattress, siding from the people.

“what do you all want from me?” she picks up the pair of scissors next to her. “why am I here? what is this place?”

“This is a hospital mam. you just came back from a mission and you were severely injured. we kept you here on the medication for much time and now you are fine.” the doctor replies calmly.

“Where am I?” rosa points the scissors on his neck.

“in a hospital.”

“which planet am I on?”

“earth. you are on earth.”

“How did I come back here. I wasn’t supposed to be here.” she cuts herself in the middle. “I need to meet my superiors. call them here, now! or else I will cut your damn throat.”

“Okay, okay. calm down, I am calling there here.”

soon the room filled up with rosa’s colleagues. everyone was shocked to see her here. how could she survive? how did she come back? the millions of questions stayed silent until ray entered the room. the crowd started hushing along his route. ray came and sat on the chair kept next to Rosa’s bed.

“how do you feel?” ray asks

“doesn’t matter,” Rosa replies.

“Why did you call me here? it is so soon for you to talk.”

“and too late for us to be alive.”

“How did you come back? Scorsese reported your absence soon enough for you to be dead.”

“I did come back from the dead.”

“they will come and slay you!” Rosa’s voice suddenly changes to creepy. she shouts at a high pitch, looking at the ceiling.

“What happened to you? doctor.” ray calls in.

“This is how she behaved earlier. I reported it to the embassy.” the doctor confirms.

“Does she have any mental illness?”

“I cannot be certain unless any further actions are taken.”

“Everyone, out ‘f this room. Rosa. how do you feel?”

the room empties in just one demand. it was quite than usual. ray liked to talk in silences without any disturbance.

“tired. I feel tired.” she comes back to her normal voice.

“What happened to your voice earlier?”

“I don’t know. something is happening to me. some moments, I just cannot respond to any other stimuli. I am watching everything but feel like with someone else’s eyes. it has been strange for me. I have seen everything that has happened here. I know the doctor, I saw him doing my operation, but I never opened my eyes.”

“isn’t so usual but isn’t so rare.” the Doctor complains.

“tell me where you ended up being and how?” ray asks.

“I was on the rover. searing for a signal I found in the covers. it wasn’t trying to communicate with me. somewhere else was its destination but I guess I was their medium. then the-” her voice changes to the creepy voice. “they, they are the ones who contacted me and they are the ones who will come for you. their goal is their civilization, destroyed and in agony need a world. they are hunters, not humans. ‘ll surely come for us.”

“Who are you? I know you are not Rosa.”

“human? from this planet? you will never know who I am. you will die before you even get to know about it.” the weird person stops and Rosa starts talking. “rover started moving. something was strange, I noticed. nothing was seen around. couldn’t define if I was moving or stationary. both my communication devices were blocked before I could ask for help. my alarm couldn’t be blazed. my own voice didn’t reach my head. everything slipped out of my reach and my rover was moving. every second the velocity increased.”

“velocity?” ray investigates.

“my compass was working for some seconds, charged with some kinetics. southeast was it. without any lead, I prayed to the old and new gods. it was the void, the emptiness sucked me in. later I rea-” Rosa was nowhere now. “where they saw us. they knew we lived. you, you didn’t. they have something you don’t and you have something they don’t. they want it! neither you nor they will likely compromise.” Rosa starts answering. “lized I was falling inside a black hole.”

“Rosa wait.” ray commanded.

“what happened?” Rosa asks.

“something is inside you or you are inside something. can you help yourself to be out of the person who is inside you?”

“I don’t know what is happening to me or the other person. I don’t know what to do. you tell me something.”

“every time you feel your throat dry, drink water.” saying this, the doctor passes the jug of water.

“what was I saying then?” Rosa asks.

“you were falling inside a black hole.” ray reminds.

“hmm, no sense, so telecommute, just a strong pull towards the bottom. I could see the swirling particles and meteors around me. just unto the event horizon. darkness flashing across the rover. I couldn’t see myself, I was traveling at a speed of more than a hundred kilometers per minute. no one, nothing, me and the rover which started heating up.” Rosa drinks water. “the roof burst open. flew out with the suit. I heard Scorsese chatter with charlie. somehow I was able to maintain the connection. the last sound I heard was the wavering voice of my son. I could hear him talk. he was talking to one of his friends about a girl he likes. why him? how him? got no plans but I was zilch contacted. eyes closed, brain shut.” she again drinks water. “opened my eyes. I was somewhere, some unknown place. i-

“inside the black hole?”

“Hmm.” she breathes sharply. “they were seen. all of them. different yet known. they are us, somewhere else.” her weird voice returns.

“Rosa, Rosa hear me out.”

“Rosa is no more. just they, dead within herself.” the voice fades by the end like something was pulling it deep inside Rosa. her voice becomes the womanly voice she has at the end. is Rosa herself doing all of this? did she pick it up from the place she landed?

“that place wasn’t like earth. the string theory could be applied at that planet or whatever place it was.”

“ten bloody dimensions. how beautiful could that be?”

“as quantum as beautiful.” Rosa smiles and drinks water.

“are you trying to tell me that you entered the quantum world?” ray’s face was shockingly red.

“and I came back.”

“describe me every single thing that you observed.”

“so small, picometers, smaller than that. I never imagined but I was attracted by nuclear force through the end of a dimension. I traveled past from present and future from past. there were people. strange people. ten lines perpendicular to each other from a single point.”

“don’t play riddles. speak straight, it may be your Nobel award.”

“I wasn’t attracted to the center of the atom. it was a distributing property, not to the center. the acceleration and the kinetic energy resulted in the circular motion, and as Heisenberg said I had no position as I walked with the momentum. there was not much inside for a view. every dimension was distributed at its particular distance. nothing collides, the quarks are segregated through walls inside. It was a loose sheath. There was life inside those small loose walls. Not humans but alive, not breathing but synthesizing. I didn’t get too close to them. It was weird enough for me to just look at them. You could walk straight to the other dimension by just changing the velocity. The acceleration was so high to keep me connected with the stratum.”

“What about the passage of time?”

“Physical, unrealistic, penetrating, and Curved. Not just passive. You could bend the whole timeline and not care about the circumstances. Nothing like the grandfather paradox or any of the bootstrap paradox. Even the atomic spectra were seen inside the quark. The patches were differently layered by genre. Blue, yellow, green, red, and mostly black.”

“How can you describe the temperature?”

“Mediocre and ample for human survival. Not too cold and not too hot. Something about it was strange. The temperature at each dimension changes. Mayhaps the momentum, friction, and acceleration are the reasons. Another thing I noticed is the density that varied. It was a dimension in the quark-quark attraction. A physical property is a property that connects everything in the atom. Stranger, vacuum. The vacuum was one of the dimensions following the second dimension that we have. The third dimension is far away from the second. The corners form a distance in between them where nothing needs to have existed. The origin where the tree and meant to be connected aren’t really together. The figures are so small that they appear to be together. The vacuum isn’t empty. The particles in the vacuum travel in and out of existence.”

“Was there a biodiversity?” The doctor asks sitting down on the chair comfortably.

“Can’t really be sure about it.” Rosa drinks water directly from the jug, tired of filling up the glass. “I couldn’t describe them as organisms. The only thing I know about them is that they can move and talk to each other in some way I couldn’t understand. No stimuli reactions or metabolism. They are so small for us to evaluate but they do live within us and with us. They are everywhere. And they are coming.” Her voice starts changing to the man’s voice. “disturbing enough to know that you aren’t the only one alive and more in the population who can change the way the world function. They are the ones who can. The moment they stop living, nothing will exist, except a huge black hole that will eventually consume the whole universe. the void Destroying everything in its way.” The voice suddenly stops speaking.

“are you here Rosa?” ray questions.

“I am. I can hear you.”

“How did you come back?”

“I don’t remember correctly. I was pondering through the streets of the atom. Something banged with me. Everything started moving. I looked back to the thing that banged and then no scene that I can recall in my memory.”

“elaborate it.”

“trying to mix with those non-metabolic organisms I was capturing their moves. The way they function and their interests.” Rosa vanishes. “You wanna know what happened? I’ll tell you directly what happened. Inside the black hole, the temperature rises to millions of degrees. The atom couldn’t survive at that temperature. It needed its energy to be changed in a different form. You’re a scientist, you know that it can’t be destroyed as being a form of energy but can be transformed. For the transformation, all the nearby Atoms collided giving rise to neutrinos which weren’t able to live at that same temperature. They decomposed. The only thing that then existed was nothingness.”

“nothingness. I what sense do you mean that?”

“There exist no atoms in the near universe you live. You all are going to die.”