It was one of the thick summer nights in New York City. The kind that permeated the air with fever dreams and sweaty armpits. Columbia College, that bastion of ingenuity, that ghetto Ivy-League, stood steadfast in the light, light breeze. The dorms filled with the flickering of light and the occasional late-night partier stepping out into the heat.

In a room with no lights on, except perhaps the light of the computer screen monitor flickering with the typing of keys onto the keyboard. Thick cigarette smoke drifted off from the window. A fan twirled and danced in the room all to the gentle melody of the man in front of the computer, feet tapping.

Tapping rhythmically and stopping at the same rhythm. Papers clog every pore of the desk except for the monitor and keyboard. And sitting in the chair, is Lev Hernandez first of his name, slayer of probably nothing at all. And he writes and he writes and taps and taps for hours upon hours of the night.

Words stream into his head and filter into his brain which filters onto the page and creates a story. For he has been writing for so long and he has just begun to get into his groove. The tapping increases in fervor, the clicking, the clacking of the keyboard comes back into a frightening crescendo. With E keys corresponding to the loud crash of the space bar again and again as words fall down onto the page.

He tears open one of the papers strewn about. On it, an idea, “A boy who has just moved to school falls in love with the beautiful but strangely unpopular senior” and Lev begins to write again. The sweat continues to pour from his armpits, the stains growing longer like a sad smile in the humidity. 

He tries to take a bite of something, something? He spits it out, he had bitten into his own hand. He still, however, ignores it and goes back to writing. Writing even harder. The night was still young and he was still writing for it. Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Someone was still out and about at this hour? Louder and louder they went, heavy boots on the floor. A sharp turn of the doorknob is all it would take. But they fade away, must’ve been a partier back from town. Nothing important.

Lev got up, he had written so much, the publisher would want to see it tomorrow but for today, he could rest. He could eat for today. The chair groaned after his weight left it. Lev grimaced, a character in one of his stories wouldn’t have that happen. They were skinny, or at least he thought of them as skinny, but never muscular, that was always someone else. You could never be muscular. 

The characters in the story got up. Lived their lives. Danced their little songs among the tapestry of pages falling all the way down to the bottom. Just like drops of rain but it all seemed to go past Lev. The words didn’t matter anymore just the way he said them. Just the emotion behind them. What lay beyond the page was the only thing in his mind.

He took a drag of smoke. Something was watching Lev but he did not know. Something ancient in the back of his room clouded in smoke. But smoke made out of whisps and whispers of the people in the city. Words cloaked its body as it watched on.

Lev’s typing grew frenzied horrifying, terrifying frenzy took ahold of Lev. Grabbed his mind like thumps and attacks on the walls of a great city. His characters began to dance. Singing and dancing in the stories. Kissing and loving their children and becoming one with their friends. They were building something, a statue in honor of their creator, Lev. It was large, bronze covered it in a sheen like no other.

The entity in the corner watched on. Tapping its long finger against its temple, it’s skin blending in almost till was unseeable with the smoke. A scream came from outside, Lev didn’t seem to notice, but It did. It seemed to grin, or something about it did. Something indescribable, and ancient. It’s cuffs dotted with the lines and crescents of the Aztec gods but emblazoned onto it something else.

Lev was still writing and time had gone by. Whistled away by the wind flowing through the window. Now it seems that the heat from before had left and only left Lev in his room. The itch in his brain, the itch of the writing, of the curse of words and letters could not leave. And finally, his story was built. The worship and glee of it all. He could see the way the characters danced and built and sung their songs. The grammar of the worlds of man seemed to come together.

Lev sensed it, the strangest of things, something in the air or the air. Something beyond simple emotions or feelings or sensations, it was the embodiment of thought made true. It noticed it too, but only in the sense of the way a creature watched a movie go by. It knew this energy, somehow.

And Lev shuddered, his eyes saw it for what it was. The energy, the purest of expressions of creativity and beauty and art. It all had come together. A brilliant shadow had formed inside his mind. He had found the Energy.

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His eyes became the color of the smoothest of full moons, a reflection, but what was it reflecting. The sweat flung from his body and crashed against the walls, creating such an awful wrack, an awful sound. It saw all of this. It knew all of this, for it could see all. It saw the way his neck turned in such a bent way. In the way that nobody had done before him in this world. A change had come over Lev, had taken him by the hand and wrought him for his juice. 

The Energy seemed to come into his brain, going inside the nerve clusters but not as electricity. In Lev’s mind, something seemed to change. To wrap itself around itself and become anew. He saw the energy take ahold of his mind. And latch onto it.

A sharp pain went into Lev’s brain. Pain, pain, pain, all the way down inside his head turn him about. Destroying him, the energy was destructive utterly destructive and utterly unstoppable. A roar of jet engines shouted through his mind, everything was getting destroyed and recreated and destroyed again. He was being ruined and remade at the same time.

And it all came to an end. The room fell into a deep silence, the entity in the room was gone. All was still except the fan and the breathing of Lev. For he was still alive but barely holding on. He had been touched by the hand of God and he could never recover from it. The energy made sure of it.

He staggered out of his chair and to the central meeting area of the dorm. Pushing out of the way food take out containers, tumbling, stumbling, opening the door trying to get somewhere safe. Thirst had crept up on him, somehow made worse by the energy. He needed water and he needed it badly.

Like the heat of the mountains of Columbia on which his father had once taken him. He gasped and gasped. His mind flitting through pieces of memory all clearer than the last. It seemed to be a breaking point of understanding. The Energy had unleashed the floodgates of memory and thought and of love and beauty. All of the thoughts he used to remember as pictures were now full entire videos. He remembered his father's exact smile, the exact lighting shining against his teeth. The way that he turned back to look at Lev climbing up the rock. 

He grabbed a glass and poured himself water. Taking long giant sips from the glass periodically. Slivering, sliding down into his throat, intoxicating him on whatever treats it provided. The Energy in his mind was roaring, racing, fighting against his very body. The energy surged with each gulp of water, an ocean against his brain. It sat there and needed somewhere to go, it needed somewhere to be

Lev scampered out of the meeting space and into his shabby room, the bed against the corner covered in food stains and the remnants of dandruff and hair. He didn’t want to take off the clothes, he didn’t deign to try. He just let the dirt and soot and cigarette smoke infuse the bed. Like a pig, he would sleep in his own filth. Trying to get this energy to calm, to not want to kill his skull.

The Energy throbbed against his head, creating with it a terrible headache. His mind broke apart into tiny pieces and was forged together again by its terrible tendrils. For its body’s tendrils latched onto his brain's recesses and dug in. Deep breaths, remembered from his terrible highschool English teachers mindfulness lessons didn’t help either. He focused on her for a second and the world of memory absorbed him into its folds.

The soft smells of urban socialites or the thirty-year-old equivalent greeted him. In his sweat, the memories seeped into his head. For what else could he do except think and think and think. A painful painful thought. The Energy grew stronger, it was a strength, purest holiest strength made incarnate.

He focused, the whirls and ticks of the architecture of his mind started to move. He thought a thought, about writing. And the ideas came to him like a tornado. Stories that would never have come plucked from the air around him but most importantly they resonated.

A kiss on the cheek of some unsuspecting child, unaware of it’s meaning. A small glance glinted back from the eyes of the girl that the boy always looked at. He understood it all. The beauty and grace of loves first kiss that it gave to him. He grabbed the energy with his own mind, he could control it, he could make it do whatever he wanted.

He fumbled in the dark. His hands searching for the notebook he had put on his bedside table. There, underneath a coffee mug, there. And he began to write. First, at the pace of a snail, or perhaps a tortoise, but then faster, and faster, until his hands could not leave the pen and the paper could not leave the pen either. Faster and faster the words came. A final horrible, horrifying, terrible, crescendo. A loud crack at dawn. His pen was lightning shot down from the heavens down to strike the sins of the page.

The energy took into his mind, it started to go stronger, heavier, better. Until it coalesced and formed into something. It had come to the end of this charade. His mind raced and raced, and finally, it came out. The page changed.

Slightly at first, but then faster and faster and faster until it was unrecognizable. The characters were deeper than before, the people were more realistic but not even just real they were more beautiful. Their story was even greater. He had done it. The energy oozed from his brain and onto the words until it became the words, it was the words.

Finally, he finished, his work was complete. His eyes grew weary, his mind tired, the energy seemed to recede and he fell asleep.

But while he slept the world shifted. It changed and something had taken its place. All over the world, every single human received a little blue screen in front of them with a message. Men on the tops of skyscrapers working desk jobs received it, ancient tribes still stuck in the forests of their youth received it. Some scratched their heads, some sighed and resigned themselves to their fate, and some just simply didn’t believe it.