1939

JESSE

“...an accident.” That’s what Friedrich called it, but he quickly rectified it to mean that it would only be classified an accident to the people that chose to stargaze on that particular night. For me, it was a cold and calculated move that would lead to the continuance of the universe. I’ve spent my life researching things far beyond those around me—and I have to this point dedicated my entire existence toward furthering advancements into space.

And now I was to give it all up. There was something he didn’t initially tell me about my trip into space, something that anybody wishing to venturing to the out-there as I had once called it should most definitely know.

He told me exactly how it would happen, I would breach the atmosphere in our homemade rocket—a term that horribly undervalues the amount of work I had put into perfecting this space-cub. My lion to the stars. As soon as I left Earth I would be redirected onto the gravitational orbit of our Moon, and would then be pulled away from the moon using my ship’s hypernate thrusters to swing myself around and launch myself directly into hyper-space—technology that wouldn’t be discovered for another three hundred years, mind you, and thrust my ship straight into a wormhole.

He told the plan to me with the straightest of all of his faces, the most normal thing he’d said all day to someone, probably. I, of course, didn’t take it the way I think he wanted me to take it. Or maybe I did, he knows everything, of course. How much did I have to act to be outside of his knowledge? Does he know that I’d oppose it, or even think of being for this plan now just to see if I could one up him? I’m sure of it.

Isa was no longer a small child amazed with the possibilities of the unknown, she stayed at home and took care of her two children with her husband Millard. It was an oversight on my younger self’s part to even believe she’d still want to be near me after I’d spent the majority of my time outside of any lifely requirements thousands of miles away.

“Why do all of this...?” I broke out of my twenty-two year long reverie. Never once did I ask that question. My burning desire to see the stars up close and my faith in the man who knew everything blinded me to see what I had been working towards. I had no life, no friends, none of my family ever regarded me outside of necessity.

This man...Friedrich was a knowledgeable face that hid a sinister agenda. I understood it finally, and I realized that the faces of the creatures that I’d seen in my childhood nightmares all belonged to this one man. I had never wanted to admit that the darkness had been so close to me, but here I stand being told that my life as I know it is gone, and that I must go on and pilot the ship that will most certainly kill me.

I can’t say no, because I know that it is my destiny to pilot that ship. I have no life to return to, no person within. I’m just a boy who got his eye ripped out inside an adult’s body with no place to go but further down. And so, the only question that I can ask, one that I’m sure is the only one he is waiting for: “Why?”

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“Your actions here are important,” he reassures me. I know it’s bullshit, and he knows I know it’s bullshit. “This is to prepare for another’s story, a boy named Devon Campton who will be born in the years to come.”

“I’m...”

“But a prologue.” He turns on his heels, “Now come, you aren’t the only one that’s going to be making this trip. Consider yourself...half of a prologue.”

The words shattered whatever was considered my heart, that lump of flesh in my chest that felt nothing and did nothing but pump blood to a slave of fate. I took a step forward and followed him. He introduced me to the other pilot on my journey, a woman around my age named Rose Linden. I didn’t know her story, and Friedrich didn’t seem to care enough to tell me. I understood that that was solid proof that my life was going to end before the sun had set.

Time passed and before I knew it the ship had begun to take off. Now, I don’t know if it was because I didn’t care, or if I didn’t want to care anymore, but I seem to recall meeting Rose before. Maybe in a bar somewhere, maybe in a hotel somewhere. I don’t think that’s entirely possible, though, since I’m sure I’d only just met her, but my mind may just be playing tricks on me.

I remember drinking lots of champagne.

The ship lifts off the ground, the interior is deadly silent. Neither of us speak to each other, whether that be from her remembering me too, or if it’s because she’s some mind slave to Friedrich that’s ten levels below me...I don’t know. I feel a sickness in my stomach as the ship keeps propelling forward, like everything I had ever wanted was being drenched in poison right in front of me and then served on a plate at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

I didn’t have a moment of my life flashing before my eyes because I had no real life to flash. Instead, I saw his life. The boy whose life was predicated on the waste that was my own. It makes a twisted sort of sense, but his was the last that I wanted to see. I started to get angry.

Angry at myself, angry at Friedrich, even angry at Rose beside me, who I couldn’t notice more than her protruding stomach...even angry at the budding human inside her body. And then as we gravitated toward the moon I found that the one person I could stay mad at was the one that the anger flowed the easiest to. I was angry with him.

That anger flowed through everything that was left of me as we swung around and it never ceased. I don’t know how long we were inside of that ship, it felt like years, I don’t know how I would have lived that long if possible, but nothing else seemed to matter. I saw the wormhole before my eyes and it was the most horrible looking beauty that I’d ever seen, but it could still not defer the slightest bit of rage from my boiling blood. As the ship passed through I screamed for the first time in over twenty years. It was a blood-curdling scream that tore itself at the seams.

My body was completely and wholly disintegrated, our ship split in two. Rose accomplished a great feat for man, but one not a surprise to Friedrich. She landed on an uncharted planet in a far off galaxy where she would soon give birth to a healthy baby boy. His name doesn’t matter, and Rose wouldn’t matter in the long run, because the both of them would be renamed by history as “Adam” and “Eve” by some cruel reference to the origin of a completely new species on a planet that hid its sun like a prized commodity.

Of course, this planet would be known as Tetrose in the Black Eye Galaxy, and Eve would raise her Adam to grow up to be healthy using the various sources of food and shelter across the empty planet. Two would become three as the plan to repopulate began, and over the course of seven thousand and some years the Messians would gather on Sayar as a communal outpost in the vastness of space.

What happened to me was much less of an easy story.