I remember that event very clearly! In fact, I don’t know anybody that doesn’t remember that event. It wasn’t the kind of thing that you could just forget.
My parents told me one time about the day the twin towers in New York were attacked and how they remember exactly what they were doing when they heard about it. There was also one of those big space shuttles that blew up. Not the ones being built by SpaceX, no, the old ones. Anyway, they said that one morning, one of those big shuttles exploded in the air over Texas and they remember it like it was yesterday. Man, my parents are old!
Anyway, I remember when the event happened because I woke out of a dead sleep and looked down at my watch. I always thought it was weird that it happened at 2:37 in the afternoon. You would think for being some earth-changing event that it would happen at midnight or something not some random time in the midafternoon like that.
I knew that something was wrong the moment I woke up because everybody was staring around like I was. Even the teacher, Mr. Healton, had stopped his monotone history lecture and was looking around with this face of doom. Everybody could feel it but nobody could figure out what they felt. It was so bad that everybody on the bus was talking about it the whole bus ride.
I didn’t have to listen to that too long since I live less than a dozen blocks from the high school but everybody, even the bus driver was talking about that weird creepy feeling. When I got back to the house, I threw my backpack on my bed and turned on my computer. Three minutes later, I had my snack, my drink, and my headphones and I was off to surf the web. There was chatter about it all over the web! This thing, whatever it was, happened all across the world! Holy shit!
It wasn’t until the next day when I got home that the shit really started to hit the fan. I was surfing the net like normal but the headlines on my web browser when I opened it caught my attention. Babies Don’t Cry Anymore! I started to call bullshit and scroll past it when I read a little of the article below and stopped. I usually don’t read any of those annoying news articles because I prefer to get all my news from the great book of faces. That day, however, was different.
The article said that every baby since the incident had been born acting weird. They wouldn’t cry despite the best efforts of the doctors. Most babies, unless born with birth defects, were eerily aware of their surroundings, silently watching everybody and everything that went on. The article could have been just a big load of fear-mongering except for the tube video. It was a twelve-minute reel of various newborns whose parents had given consent to be filmed. They were Momo and Slenderman levels of creepy!
Every baby in the film would just stare at the camera and if there was any movement, they would DART their eyes around! They had to have support for their heads just like any baby but that was where the similarities stopped. None of them would cry and there were even some shots in the baby room, whatever it’s called, at a hospital. The camera avoided looking at all the babies except one but that didn’t keep them from looking at the camera or cameraman. It was like Twilight Zone BS.
That evening, after mom got home, she wouldn’t stop crying. I knew she was pregnant but I hadn’t really considered what that would be like for her. She was screaming and crying about the same videos that I had been binging since I got home. They were real, all of them. They were being taken all over the world too and many places didn’t stop people from filming somebody else’s kid. Dad eventually told the three of us to get in the car. We went out to eat since mom wasn’t in any condition to do any kind of cooking. I could have cooked but only if I was warned and then it would only be pasta helper or maybe spaghetti. Going out was the safe bet.
When we got to the restaurant, that was the subject that everybody was talking about there too. There was a pregnant waitress and she was talking about it. She didn’t seem to be very concerned about it though and I think that it helped mom deal with the stress. Mom just wasn’t the kind of person that dealt with stress very well. Having three kids and being pregnant with a fourth certainly didn’t help.
Of her three, soon-to-be-four children, I was the oldest. After me, was my bratty, tomboy, preteen sister Alisha. Then my little brother Jim. He was in elementary and hated when I said so. He was a little nerd who stayed glued to his video games and tube videos about people playing video games. Seriously, how is that even fun? Watching somebody else play a boring 2D game! Whatever.
Well, we just thought that the news from the previous day was big. The news on the next day was so big that they interrupted the Friday tests to show it on the big lesson boards in every class. It was live footage of a newborn baby talking! It was some kid in Utah of all places and he was talking like it was the most normal thing ever. What he told everyone shocked the world.
He told them that his name was Edmond and that he had died at the age of seventy-eight a couple of days before when he felt the incident creeping him out. He described the feeling of his heart giving out and kicking the bucket in Alaska! The guy was some old geezer from Alaska and now he was a newborn! Mom was not going to be okay with this! And I was right, she wasn’t.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Our mom was never the same after that day, and it was way worse after my baby sister was born but we’ll get to that in a minute. The creepy factor just kept ramping up and up! Babies were being discovered all over the globe that could speak but only those born after the incident. Not all of them spoke in the language of the region either. Our own hospital had a few cases of German people and Chinese people being born. That was before everybody stopped keeping track.
The ones that were the creepiest were the ones that spoke a language that nobody recognized and that was most of them. It turned out that only about ten percent of babies were being born as people who had died on earth. They started employing linguists and people who could use language translators became a necessity in the hospitals. That was how they figured out the other languages.
One of the people in the uhm baby section, started to hear patterns in the words of one of the babies that weren’t speaking a normal language. Well anyway, she figured out one of the five major common languages. Other people began following her example shortly after and things got so weird after that. That’s when the other babies started talking to us.
The picture they painted was weird. Reincarnation was how people were always born, according to them. The ratio of those reincarnating on their own world was always highest. About one in ten so that’s ten percent, I think. The other nine of them would be from the uncountable worlds beyond their own. Freaky shit!
What’s more, most worlds spoke one of five main languages but there were dozens of worlds that insisted on speaking their own languages and forced every newborn to learn that language. Also worth mentioning is that most worlds seem to be magic worlds. YES, that’s right, Magic!
Only when my little sister was born did we find out how rare our technological world was. My sister was supposed to be Jacelyn but when she was born my mom wouldn’t force her to take a new name. My mom had been looking forward to taking care of a baby, can you imagine? I mean, I can kind of get how she was feeling but I certainly wouldn’t want to have to change diapers constantly and the whole feeding at weird hours thing, just no.
So my sister took her old name and we had Vrix in the family. She spoke one of the five main languages and by that time there was auto-translation software for all of them and several others besides. So Vrix was able to talk to us as soon as she was born. That was trippy for the first few months but then it just became normal. After a year, everyone had gotten used to it and there were studies on all sorts of new things opening up thanks to the information provided by the reincarnated.
There were colleges that taught magic opening all over the world. Not just one type either but several different variants. There were things being learned about the cosmos around us at a frightening new pace. Of course, nobody could see any of the worlds where these reincarnated came from so there were always those that doubted. And the worst were the churches who claimed that this was all a trial by god and if we were just faithful enough, then everything would go back to the way they were before but nobody was buying that. Overall, it was an interesting time to be alive.
Not everything was fun and games though. There were a bunch of people that were causing no end to number of problems. The reincarnated would sometimes be people who had died and had big businesses or lots of money. Imagine the mess that they caused when they showed up as newborns and tried to claim they still owned everything. Matters were made worse by reincarnated being born with the souls of scammers who claimed to be people they weren’t. A lot of new laws had to be written about all kinds of things and even more about all the magic stuff. Nothing in the law said you couldn’t kill somebody with magic and you can imagine the scummy types using that and the lawyers that were worse.
Well anyway, my little sister, Vrix, turned out to have been an elf before. Oh yeah, that’s a thing. Turns out that every weird thing that lived in some cartoon or crawled out of a kids' book about wizards was real. All of the weird peoples from every fantasy imagined and then a few. Vrix was an elf before and a Golem before that! She also said that the farther back you tried to remember, the harder it was to keep straight. She was pretty sure that she was a dwarf guy before that.
Oh yeah, you could also flip genders, not like all the hype where guys wanted to walk into women’s bathrooms but like really being on the flip side. So anyway, before being a dwarf, she was a rabbit, a dragon, a merman, and a few other things. The problem was that she couldn’t remember what order those lives were in but she could remember a little bit about them here and there. Trippy!
Anyway, Vrix and I got along great! Better than anybody else in the family. She would tell me all these stories about how she was some kind of wyvern-riding knight in a land called Praelza and I would record it all on tube and post the vids online. We never got any big following because everybody’s baby brother or sister had some kind of story like that. Vrix was fascinated by watching tube with me and liked learning about our world as much as I liked learning about her last one.
She also began teaching me magic! I could do elemental magic a little bit. I had an aptitude for wind magic and a little bit for water magic too. I knew about three spells and that was too many in my dad’s opinion. Magic was against the bible he would say. Wish I learned a lot more or maybe listened and not done any at all. That’s how I died!
I was showing off for Vrix in the backyard We had a trampoline and she was old enough to be walking pretty much anywhere she wanted to. She was four but she of course acted way older. Anyway, she saw the trampoline and asked me about it so I showed her what it was and how it worked. She was watching with fascination and I wanted to show her what all I could do.
I somehow got it in my head that it would be a good idea to show her that I had gotten the gale spell figured out while I was in the air. It wasn’t. I shot the gust off and suddenly I was higher than before and now that I was falling, I realized too late that I wasn’t over the center of the trampoline anymore. There was a moment of searing pain in my neck and I could hear Vrix screaming at the top of her lungs, then nothing.