Wormhole

"He doesn't have a shadow! He doesn't have a shadow!" Celeste's perpetual voice screamed from beneath her mind while her lips remained glued. Her nonplussed body sat at the chair paralysed, looking at the man with the mysterious vibrance as he gazed at her with omniscient integrity.

The night sky sparkled from the light of tiny illuminations scattered like sown seeds in a field. The air grew cold beneath the atmosphere as the veil of darkness fell on the fragile boundaries of the exosphere. Celeste gaped at the outstretching domain of darkness before her as she stood near the windowsill in her room. An array of thoughts flickered one by one inside her mind. 'Who was that strange man?', the enduring image of her new professor charged her memory with lightning speed. She could fixate his standing posture, aligned obscuring the sunlight that fell from the side windows of the room, this morning. Yet to counteract her prudent conscience, the man was devoid of a shadow. She thought of a reasonable justification to it but found none.

 The ebbed emotion of believing in spirits and voodoo magic was long gone from her lofty mind. Yet something nagged the back of her head. She coveted to call it a different name, Science. Perhaps she was hallucinating or worse, making things up to pretend that she despised their current physics professor. Her imprudent belief of an indolent new recruit slaughtering her love for a pious subject may have caused her to clutch onto such surrealistic claim. 'Whether a man carried a shadow or not was none of her business', she convinced herself. The gentle breeze of the mid-November glided through her braids and whispered in her ears. 

The sounds were back. The candid hum of nature, like a voice guiding her to pay close attention to a detail that she was missing.

As a child, the sounds she heard were feeble, mere murmurs but as she gained more teeth inside her mouth and more muscles beneath her skin, she began receiving them with real augmentation. She perceived them as the soul of the universe buzzing out the energy into nature. This buzz must be what nature-lovers derive from the ecstatic vehemence offered by the earth; her body drifted to the hum as her feet rose from the ground, ignoring gravity.

---

Celeste glanced out of the car to the infinite sky as she headed to school the next day. The sky was turquoise blue with white clouds forming amoeboid figures, but Celeste would discern the adjoining nebulous haze and flourish her imagination with absurd pictures. That was one of her unrealistic hobbies. Celeste was good at everything she did; from excelling in class to figuring out how to get away from a rabbit hole in one piece, she established her intelligence utterly extraterrestrial. But she defied several laws of nature, some she would keep a secret from even her mother, who to date, have loved her dearly and spared no effort to let her daughter forget about the absence of her father. 

"Your father loved you very much, dear", her mother would say to Celeste with teary eyes each year, on the day of his commemoration. Part of Celeste wanted to join her mother and shed a tear or two on the remembrance of her father, but part of her was numb to the notion of feeling any sort of emotion towards the man with hazel eyes and distinctive features whom she has seen only in photographs. He worked in the Nuclear Power Plant located at a former quarry near an artificial lake of square kilometres twenty-two. Every year, Celeste would listen to her mother who would say, about how one of the reactors of the Plant exploded and how it took the life out of the man who meant the world to her. All the while, Celeste thought about the denaturation of the flesh and the possible impact of the energy of her father's soul on the Universal energy.

It was her mother's practice to make her believe about the concept of life after death. In Celeste's childhood, her mother would take her to the patio adjoining their apartment and made her look at the night sky in its whole glory and told her that her father was one among those stars looking after them. She never believed her mother.

Celeste needed proof for theories. She believed in logic rather than hypotheses. Hence, Celeste relied upon Science. But sometimes she deceived the very science. As the energy inside her surged limitlessly, Celeste would let a small amount of it out of her confined system of the human body, by concentrating on the rhythm of nature. She felt immensely cleansed afterwards. It had been two months since she found out a way to conform her energy. At first, the tremendous outburst of energy lifted her feet off from the ground compelling her to tumble down onto the floor. Celeste was scared for days to give another try, yet her curiosity surmounted her fear. A month later, she perfected the art of transfiguration of energy.

The turquoise blue sky transformed into cyan blue as Celeste descended from the car. She parted from her mother, waving goodbye and headed to the main entrance of her school to vanquish yet another day of her Senior year.

The cacophony of the imminent generation was heard from a distance as Celeste ascended the steps to the hallway. Beneath the perfectly whitewashed decor of the hallway, on a perceptible spot on the wall, lay the words,' To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit', adjacent to it was the portrait of a senile man in a wheelchair, Stephen Hawking. Though his body remarked the amount of weakness, his words were way too stoic to be judged. He was Celeste's God. 'The Brief History of Time' was her holy book. 

She recalled the day the words caught her eyes. 10th November, International Science Day, the school hosted numerous activities on emerging science. The walls of the hallway were struck with the accomplishments of science. As a week pass, the words of the great physicist of all time remained unscathed, while the rest of the artefacts were gone; crumbled to pieces.

Celeste revived the memory of one among Dr Hawking's words,' We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star'. She admired his dedication to find out the mystery of the Universe, she too felt the same need. But he has left us with only minor details. Humanity had a million miles left to cover to unlock the secrets buried within the heart of the Universe, Celeste thought. A sense of aspiration originated in her spirit, the same longing that she felt a week before when her focus caught the essence of science in the origin of life; she attempted to find out the enigma of the perpetual reality.

During those days an assumption crept her mind, a provoking idea, a view Celeste never thought to have, one that repudiated the whole notion of the existence of the Superior One as society elicited Him. Celeste's mind proposed the opinion of the Universe as an experiment inside a bowl like the one Oparin and Haldane did, to demonstrate the seamless erudition of origin of life. She searched for a hint to not believe the theory but found none. Her quest continued, to prove that the complete mundane occurrence of human life is not an inspection inside an apparatus of a much more shrewd creature from another dimension.

As Celeste walked through the aisle of fleeting memories, she sensed the heat of stiff gaze on her. In a short distance, she saw her new physics professor approaching her at a swift pace. His walk brisk and ascetic, and his eyes probing her for something beyond her imagination.

"Ms Bernard, Meet me at my office after the class", Professor Shaw instructed her and left in a blink pulverising her mind as Celeste wondered about what she had done wrong. A suggestive amount of thoughts clouded her mind as she proceeded to her class already envisioning how long the day was going to be.

---

"What is your opinion about evolution, Ms Bernard?", Professor Shaw sat at his office chair opposite to a bewildered Celeste, while the sunlight dispersed from the windows behind him and creased the outline of his features. No shadow, Celeste noticed fascinated. Yet her mind was preoccupied with the conflicting thoughts of the pragmatic chivalry of a physics professor; concerning himself with a notable topic of biology. Her coercive senses compelled her to answer the question rather than offer one of her own.

"It's the gradual change in the traits of a species over time, Sir. That's what Mrs Jones told the class during the biology lectures.", Celeste's answered genuinely. A gracious smile crept on Mr Shaw's face.

 "Tell me, Ms Bernard, is it possible for a human being to evolve and harness the energy of the Universe and transform it?", the words escaped the Professor's lips with exact precision along with a mocking smile, striking Celeste who then knew that there was more to this shadowless man who sat opposite to her in disturbing elegance. Seeing the astonishment in Celeste's eyes, the Professor discerned that she took the bait.

"I don't know, sir", she hesitated and spoke cautiously challenging him, "Maybe. For a person without shadows, it would be possible".

She was smart, indeed, the Professor felt stark compassion towards her, but he needed answers of how Celeste was able to perform the act of transfiguration of energy that was hard for even him to do.

"Celeste", the Professor's voice calmed and to Celeste's surprise, he addressed her in her first name, "There is something that you need to know". Celeste knew that it would be quite an adventurous story ahead.

"Evolution has created an advanced species with brain usage greater than that of all the species that ever existed on earth, the Empyreans. They flourished in numbers and tackled the problems once faced by humanity. With the progression of neural function, around seventy-five per cent, they created and moulded themselves into ultimate perpetual beings with stringent laws and systems of administration. Their powers were limitless, from extracting energy from particles smaller than atoms to flexing their ability to transform themselves into meagre bundles of energy; they hastened the process of evolution. Over time, they developed research on their ancestors, the humans", the Professor paused for Celeste to catch up. She sat at the chair, her body immobile while she registered the information produced by her physics teacher. Her theory came into light. Could it be this simple that a human, like her could hypothesise it? she thought.

"How do you know all of these, P-Professor?", Celeste needed more answers to quench her eternal curiosity.

"I'm an Empyrean", his words struck Celeste like a lightning bolt, creating turbulence inside her mind. For a moment of time, electricity coursed through her veins rather than blood.

He continued, "As a part of the research, there were specific guidelines that allowed us to dwell into matters that humans would find extremely repugnant. Most of them were confidential. One among them was the recreation of the Universe that humans plundered. The expedition was renovated in various stages. It is still unknown to us how our Sovereign Scientist developed the first human from a gene. Human behaviours and characteristics were strictly studied with the utmost care. On occasions, those among us would remodel ourselves into a human posture. We lacked shadows since these weren't our real bodies. For a long time, we provided humans with knowledge and fidelity through a powerful medium, Religion."

There was a wide door of veracity opening before Celeste to ponder the very existence of the human race. All that she saw and heard were far from the truth. She kept on rethinking about facts that were laid before her. She could have estimated it all as false and walked right through that door. Yet she stayed to watch the shallow lies of the human world vapourising. But there was one obvious question that nagged at the back of her mind.

"Why are you telling me all of this?", her audacity to question this story lay on the gentleness of his words and the affection he had shown.

"Because I needed to know how you channelled the energy into the atmosphere. Even I can't do that unless I transfigure myself into a human or any other form. Yet you managed to accomplish it with flying colours without changing your form.", the tone of Mr Shaw's voice was desperate like a studious little boy who lost his top rank to another.

"Maybe I have evolved a little too", Celeste proposed.

"Or maybe you reverted to a little human nature". And then the fog lifted from Shaw's mind. "The Empyreans lack the complexities of strong emotions, but your human side could incorporate robust emotions and channel the energy, creating boundaries without defying laws. ", cognisance gleamed in Shaw's eyes. 

"A rare case of atavism in a genetic hybrid. Excellent!" Shaw stood up with amazement and started pacing back and forth in triumph, thrilled by his findings which was the sole purpose of his arrival.

"Hybrid?" Celeste questioned the new term that originated.

Shaw drew a sharp breath into his energised non-existent system and continued, "The research continued till date because of the legitimate work of our Sovereign Scientist. Once, he commuted himself into a human form to establish peace at the time of intense crisis in the earth. But he couldn't return after resolving the issue as he fell deeply in love with a human of the earth. Even though it was uncommon for the Empyreans to resort to emotions, our Sovereign Scientist stayed. His mate conceived a child. But to his misfortune, he was called back by our Supreme Commander which he obeyed with great dismay. Still, he looks after her from Empyrean Terrain. Your father is alive in our terrain, Celeste. Cyrus is an Empyrean."

There were fluctuations in Celeste's normal heart rate, tremors at the edge of her fingers, her breathing was uneven and her eyes brimmed with tears. For eighteen years, she felt apathetic towards her father, but now as Shaw point out the absolute obviousness of her father, Celeste felt abashed, hurt and stupefied. She wondered if her father could sense her now, in that terrain, contemplate the distress she felt. For a moment, she felt like a worthless daughter.

Sensing Celeste's anguish, Shaw gently acknowledged her, "There is a reason why you don't fit into this sceptical world, Celeste, you are an essence of the future in the past, a hybrid of time, a wormhole and know that your father loves you dearly, no matter what".

A gentle breeze entered the room, caressed her cheeks and hummed in her ears.