Blood, laughter, and beatings. Feelings and experiences.

Stop it! Wait a minute, there’s something else. I feel something else—Screams! Lots of screaming!

Red stains on the stone walls. Cracks in the walls.

Every time a body hit the ground, dust curtains were raised, showing their claws, wanting to scratch his face. He turned away and closed his eyes; not to avoid seeing the violent massacre, but to avoid getting dust in his eyes. It was annoying to have to wipe it off later.

Once that frenzy of screams and squeals stopped, he reopened his eyes and came across a mysterious scene.

Strange as it may seem, the curtains of dust and dirt, which had been frozen in the air, became so dense that not even the sunset—that scarlet glow that came in from who knows where—could pass. The dust had created a brown specter that covered the murders as if they wanted to cover the horror in that cave.

Then, the stone walls lost their shape in the dark.

The scene of the tragedy had dissolved into an absolute black, devoured by a tar pond.

The cave, if it was one, had turned into a giant void that reminded him of outer space. Those long, uneven clouds of dust beat like a heart, and with each beat, they released a luminescence that dyed the dirt a reddish color mixed with blue and some green.

It was a cold nebula that struck a strong sense of déjà vu there, deep in his mind. He’d seen it not long ago, just a few years; although that feeling evoked an earlier time, something that went back neither years, nor centuries, nor millennia, but something much, much further back, perhaps to the very origin of the universe. The feeling was shuddering, and the nebulae terrifying.

He stepped forward, and his foot struck something. He didn’t need to look down to know it was a corpse. It was the corpse of one of the students.

He avoided stepping on the body; he hated the crunch of the ribs when they broke—he hated it from the time he used to practice a daily autopsy—but he hated, even more, to step on something that wasn’t solid. He walked past it and headed for the exit.

But what exit? The sunset light, which had indicated the way out, was now dissolved in that fabulous stellar tapestry. There was no exit there.

It doesn’t matter, he thought. He knew there was a way out, and that it should be ahead of him, just a few feet away. Leaning against the rough wall of the cave, he walked, but his hand sank as if the rocks were trying to swallow it up. He lost his balance, staggered, and almost kissed the wall. Looked where his hand had lost support and discovered a hole. Someone had dug a hole in the wall.

“Hee, hee, hee, hee.” Children laughing. “Hee, hee, hee, hee.”

Annoying kids! he growled, shaking a hand as if the laughter were flies flying around him. You’ll see when I catch you all.

Yes, he knew those children. He had never seen them, but he had heard of them, alright.

He found another body, and this time he stepped on it. His foot sank into the torso of one of the murdered boys. He heard the damn crack of ribs, and something got his foot all wet. Blood and guts.

To prevent his own weight from burying him further in the body and making the mess worse, he jumped, but ended up hitting another corpse, one that was face up and with its torso completely open. The dead man had his chin pressed against his chest and his arms outstretched, as if he were showing his tragedy to anyone passing by, saying, ‘Oh, man, just look what they’ve done to me!’ He dodged it as best he could and ran into the next body on the trail; the head and part of the arms and legs had been blown off; judging from her breasts, it was a girl’s body.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Five young men, dead. No, six. There was another one who was killed outside of the cave, in the woods.

Why did you do it, Brun? he asked, and though he hadn’t said it aloud, the name he mentioned rumbled in the rock tunnel, creating echoes.

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The reddish glow of that nebulae sea beat hard, following the rhythm of the echo, Brun, Brun, Brun, Brun…

He’d almost forgotten that he was both in a cave and in outer space at the same time. He remembered it, when as he stood on the cliff, he watched as hundreds of violently spinning tornadoes rose around him, whirling dust and stars that came from far below, out of a dark ocean, rising like churning columns into another vast ocean, one that could be seen high up there.

“Hey, Broga,” he heard his brother’s voice. “Give me a hand, will ya?”

Following the voice, he turned to find Brun very close to him, caught up to his waist in one of those whirlwinds. His brother had managed to free himself in part, but the force of that space cyclone pushed him hard, trying to drag him to the heights.

“Brun!” Surprised and even a little tempted to laugh, Broga took his hand and pulled, trying to free him. “How the hell did you get there?!”

“Well, y’know, it was the Seeker,” Brun replied with alarming calm.

“The Seeker? I thought he’d died of an overdose.”

“No, no,” Brun clarified. “He’s just been hidden for a long time, in rehab. Now he has changed owners and other people are pulling on his leash.”

“Oh, I see.”

“But now he’s come for more medicine. We had a fight and… Well, my foot got tangled in his tail and now he’s dragging me with him.”

“Right. Like space debris pulled by the gravity of a rogue comet,” Broga commented.

“What are you talking about?”

“Forget it.” Broga helped himself with his legs to resist the force of the whirlwind. He suspected the battle was lost, though. “And where is that Seeker now?”

Brun nodded toward the ocean that was waiting for him up there. “He has returned to the world,” he said. “It’s there.”

“Well, then let yourself go,” Broga said.

“But if I do, the whirlwind will sweep us away, brother.”

“Let go, Brun! It’s the only way we’re both getting out of here.”

Trusting his brother, Brun stopped resisting and the galactic tornado dragged him along with Broga, who had not let go of his hand, and together they rose toward that other ocean, disappearing among dust and stars.

Until he woke up.

Broga opened his eyes, and as the weight of sleep drained from his mind like water from a sink, he felt the cold floor touch his cheek, caressing his beard, and he knew immediately that something was wrong.

A faint smell of coffee mixed with floor disinfectant. His eyesight adjusted to the dimness, he recognized the floor of his lab room and found his shattered ceramic mug next to him.

He got up.

His face and beard felt a little tight. It was dirty with dried coffee. And there on the floor, where he had been lying face down, there was also a brown stain: more dried coffee.

He had just come from the kitchen with that coffee. How had he gotten to the floor and why had that coffee evaporated so quickly? Had he passed out without realizing it? Had he suffered some kind of stroke? How long had he been away?

He looked at the watch that was part of his cybernetic wrist, and shock clenched his stomach. Friday. 1502 hours. Impossible! It must still be Tuesday. It was getting dark when he...

“Date!” he said. “Date and time!”

“Friday, Maiden 21, year 590, Markabian calendar,” the synthesized computer voice replied from the control panel.

“What?!”

“Friday, September 21, year 2110, Hyper Continental calendar,” the machine clarified.

“Yeah, yeah,” he waved his hand as if to say, ‘I wasn’t asking for clarification on the date, you silly machine.’

Impossible! How—?

Like space debris pulled by the gravity of a rogue comet. The memory of his brother’s cry for help jumped into his mind, along with the strange sensation of having been sucked into a violent space vortex.

“Computer…” he said and thought about how to phrase the question. “Where… have I been these last seventy-two hours?”

“The requested record is incomplete.” The computer’s response was quick and conclusive.

“Elaborate,” he ordered.

“You have not existed for sixty-eight hours, two minutes, twenty-five seconds.”

Broga gulped.

“Security camera twelve,” he said. “Start the video from my last record.”

A holographic recording was projected in front of him. There was the same room where he was now, seen from above. He entered the frame from the left angle, walking toward the computer console board with a cup of coffee in hand. There was some kind of interference and, from one second to the next, he disappeared, and his cup fell to the floor, breaking into pieces and spilling the coffee. Filming progressed in fast mode, and on the timer, the hours ticked by as the coffee evaporated from the floor, leaving the brown stain he now had at his feet. Then, another interference occurred in the recording, and he reappeared standing in the same place where he had disappeared, only to collapse on the ground later. A minute later, he woke up.

“Computer,” he said, “activate the spectrometer in search of quantum radiation. Take… my body as the perimeter of the search.”

A few seconds later, a few long seconds later, the answer came.

“Alterations in the space-time continuum: Affirmative. Quantum radioactive activity: Affirmative. Kappa type radiation.”

Broga’s breathing quickened. “Brun...” he whispered.

If he and Brun had been sucked into that whirlwind and he had woken up, surely Brun had too. His brother must be somewhere… maybe in the bunker?

“Computer, patch me through to Alfred.”

“Communication cannot be established. The android Alfred is out of commission.”

Broga held his breath, and with a mixture of sensations running through his throat, he took off his lab coat and put on his dark overalls in case he had to blend in with other Cyclops—hoping that wasn’t the case, although something told him that yes, it would be. He washed his face, and without wasting a moment, making use of the anti-gravity devices on his feet, he flew straight to the bunker.